^P  Sfrbins  babbitt 


ROUSSEAU  AND  ROMANTICISM. 
MASTERS  OF  MODERN   FRENCH  CRITICISM. 
THE  NEW   LAOKOON. 

LITERATURE  AND  THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE. 
Essays  in  Defense  of  the  Humanities. 

HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
Boston  a.nd  New  York 


THE    NEW  LAOKOON 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 


AN  ESSAY  ON  THE  CONFUSION 
OF  THE  ARTS 

BY 

IRVING   BABBITT 


BOSTON  AND   NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT,    IQIO,   BY   IRVING  BABBITT 
ALL    RIGHTS    RESERVED 

Published  May  iqiQ 


FOURTH   IMPRESSION 


CONTENTS 

Preface vii 

PART  I 

The  Pseudo-classic  Confusion  of  the  Arts 

I.  The  Theory  of  Imitation 3 

II.  Poetical  Diction 20 

III.  Lessing  and  the  "Laokoon" 35 

PART   II 

The  Romantic  Confusion  of  the  Arts 

IV.  The  Theory  of  Spontaneity 61 

V.  Platonists  and  Pseudo-Platonists  ...    87 

VI.  Suggestiveness  in  Romantic  Art 

1.  Word-painting 115 

2.  Programme  Music 159 

3.  Color- Audition 172 

VII.  Conclusion 

1.  The  Limits  of  Naturalism 186 

2.  Form  and  Expression 217 

Index 253 


PREFACE 

The  title  I  have  taken  for  this  book  expresses  my 
sense  of  what  needs  doing  rather  than  what  I  my- 
self would  claim  to  have  done.  I  have  suffered,  both 
in  selecting  a  title  and  in  treating  my  subject  itself, 
from  a  certain  poverty  in  our  English  critical  vo- 
cabulary. The  word  genre  seems  to  be  gaining  some 
currency  in  English.  The  same  can  scarcely  be  said 
of  the  melange  des  genres  ;  and  yet  it  is  around  the 
melange  des  genres  and  allied  topics  that  my  main 
argument  revolves.  Napoleon  is  reported  to  have 
said  to  Goethe  in  the  course  of  a  conversation  on 
a  problem  very  similar  to  the  one  I  have  attempted, 
"Je  m'etonne  qu'un  aussi  grand  esprit  que  vous 
n'aime  pas  les  genres  tranches."  I  have  often  been 
forced  to  borrow  Napoleon's  term  and  speak  of  the 
genre  tranchi^  for  lack  of  a  suitable  English  equiva- 
lent. 

Lessing  published  his  "  Laokoon  "  in  1766,  to- 
ward the  very  end  of  the  neo-classical  movement. 
The  period  of  nearly  a  century  and  a  half  that  has 
since  elapsed  has  seen  the  rise  of  the  great  romantic 
[vii] 


PREFACE 

and  naturalistic  movement  that  fills  the  whole  of 
the  nineteenth  century  and  is  now  showing  signs  of 
decrepitude  in  its  turn.  Does  the  "Laokoon"  really 
meet  the  questions  that  have  arisen  in  this  period 
as  to  the  proper  boundaries  of  the  arts,  especially 
the  boundaries  of  painting  and  writing  ?  Most  Ger- 
mans would  probably  say  that  it  does.  They  have 
surrounded  Lessing,  as  one  of  their  great  classics, 
with  a  sort  of  conventional  admiration.  From  this 
conventional  admiration  Hugo  Bliimner,  to  whom 
we  owe  the  standard  edition  of  the  "  Laokoon,"  is 
by  no  means  free.  Thus  he  says:  "The  tendency 
toward  descriptive  poetry  .  .  .  received  through  it 
[the  '  Laokoon ']  its  death-blow.  .  .  .  We  may  in- 
deed affirm  that  the  law  forbidding  the  poet  to  paint 
has  nowadays  become  a  universally  accepted  doc- 
trine." '  We  doubt  whether  this  is  true  even  for  Ger- 
many ;  it  certainly  is  not  true  for  other  countries. 
If  the  "  Laokoon  "  really  covers  the  ground  as  com- 
pletely as  Bliimner  would  have  us  suppose,  we  can 
only  say  that  no  teaching  has  ever  been  so  wilfully 
disregarded.  The  nineteenth  century  witnessed  the 
greatest  debauch  of  descriptive  writing  the  world 

'  Laokoon,  ed.  II.  lilumner,  iSSo,  p.  138. 
[  Viii  ] 


PREFACE 

has  ever  known.  It  witnessed  moreover  a  general 
confusion  of  the  arts,  as  well  as  of  the  different 
genres  within  the  confines  of  each  art.  To  take 
examples  almost  at  random,  we  have  Gautier's 
tra7ispositio7is  d'art,  Rossetti's  attempts  to  paint 
his  sonnets  and  write  his  pictures,  Mallarm^'s  am- 
bition to  compose  symphonies  with  words.  Con- 
fusions of  this  kind  were  already  rampant  within  a 
few  years  of  Lessing's  death,  in  the  writings  of 
Novalis,  Tieck,  and  Friedrich  Schlegel,. 

Now  what  I  have  tried  to  do  is  to  study  the 
"Laokoon,"  not  primarily  as  a  German  classic,  but 
as  a  problem  in  comparative  literature  ;  to  show  that 
the  confusion  with  which  Lessing  is  dealing  is  a 
pseudo-classical  confusion,  and  that  to  understand 
it  clearly  we  must  go  back  to  the  beginnings  of 
the  whole  movement  in  the  critics  of  the  Renais- 
sance ;  and  then,  in  contrast  to  this  pseudo-classical 
confusion,  I  have  traced  in  writers  like  Rousseau 
and  Diderot  the  beginnings  of  an  entirely  different 
confusion  of  the  arts,  —  a  romantic  confusion  as  we 
may  term  it,  —  which  Lessing  has  not  met  in  the 
"  Laokoon  "  and  has  not  tried  to  meet.  I  have  fol- 
lowed out  to  some  extent  this  romantic  confusion 
[ix] 


PREFACE 

m  the  nineteenth  century,  —  especially  the  attempts 
to  get  with  words  the  effects  of  music  and  painting. 
Finally,  I  have  searched  for  principles  that  may  be 
opposed  to  this  modern  confusion.  Throughout  I 
have  done  my  utmost  to  avoid  the  sclva  oscura  of 
aesthetic  theory,  and  have  kept  as  close  as  I  could 
to  the  concrete  example.  I  hope  I  have  at  least 
made  clear  that  an  inquiry  into  the  nature  of  the 
genres  and  the  boundaries  of  the  arts  ramifies  out 
in  every  direction,  and  involves  one's  attitude  not 
merely  toward  literature  but  life. 

It  involves  especially  a  careful  defining  of  certain 
large  literary  movements.  In  making  his  protest 
against  the  confusion  of  poetry  and  painting,  Les- 
sing  was  led  to  discriminate  sharply  between  what  he 
conceived  to  be  the  truly  classic  and  the  pseudo- 
classic.  Any  one  who  makes  a  similar  protest  to-day 
will  need  rather  to  discriminate  between  the  truly 
classic  and  the  romantic.  Taken  in  both  its  older 
and  more  recent  aspects,  perhaps  no  question  calls 
for  more  careful  defining  of  such  words  as  classic, 
pseudo-classic,  and  romantic.  I  confess  that  this  is 
one  of  the  reasons  why  it  attracted  mc.  A  more 
searching  definition  of  these  words  seems  urgently 
[X] 


PREFACE 

needed.  One  of  the  ways  in  which  comparative 
literature  may  justify  itself  is  by  making  possible 
definitions  of  this  kind  that  shall  be  at  once  broader 
and  more  accurate.  Many  people  are  inclined  to  see 
in  the  popularity  of  this  new  subject  a  mere  univer- 
sity fad.  They  will  not  be  far  wrong  unless  it  can 
become  something  more  than  an  endless  study  of 
sources  and  influences  and  mixiute  relationships. 
Neo  -  classicism  and  romanticism  are  both  world- 
movements.  It  should  be  the  ambition  of  the  stu- 
dent of  comparative  literature  to  make  all  attempts 
to  define  these  movements  in  terms  of  one  literature 
seem  one-sided  and  ill-informed. 

The  trouble  with  most  attempts  to  define  the 
word  romantic,  in  particular,  is  that  they  have  been 
partisan  as  well  as  provincial.  The  makers  of  the 
definitions  have  been  themselves  too  much  a  part  of 
what  they  were  trying  to  define.  They  have  opposed 
to  their  idea  of  the  romantic  a  notion  of  the  classic 
that  would  scarcely  be  avowed  by  a  respectable 
pseudo- classicist.  Indeed,  the  classical  point  of 
view  has  had  about  as  much  chance  of  a  fair  hear- 
ing during  the  past  century  as  we  may  suppose  the 
romantic  point  of  view  to  have  had  in  a  Queen  Anne 
[xi] 


PREFACE 

coffee-house,  or  at  the  court  of  Louis  XIV.  The 
perspectives  opened  up  by  comparative  literature 
will  make  it  easier  to  achieve  a  feat  that  was  achieved 
by  few  in  the  nineteenth  century,  —  that  of  seeing 
the  romantic  and  naturalistic  movement  from  the 
outside. 

This  feat  is  already  becoming  somewhat  easier  of 
achievement,  even  without  the  help  of  comparative 
literature.  It  was  in  France,  in  the  writings  of  Rous- 
seau, that  certain  romantic  and  naturalistic  points 
of  view  first  found  powerful  expression.  It  is  in 
France,  the  most  intellectually  sensitive  of  modern 
nations,  that  we  now  see  the  beginnings  of  reaction 
against  the  fundamental  postulates  of  Rousseauism. 
M.  Lasserre,  whose  brilliant  and  virulent  attack  on 
French  romanticism '  has  already  gone  through  sev- 
eral editions,  says  that  his  aim  is  not  so  much  to 
attack  this  movement  in  its  flowers  and  fruit  as  to 
pour  a  little  poison  about  its  roots.  Unfortunately 
M.  Lasserre's  book  tends  to  be  extreme,  and  in  the 
French  sense  reactionary.  A  year  or  so  ago  I 
chanced  to  be  strolling  along  one  of  the  narrow 
streets  that  skirt  the  Quartier  Saint-Germain,  and 

'  Lc  romantisme /ranfaist'pdtj  V.  Lasserre  (1907), 
[Xii] 


PREFACE 

came  on  a  bookshop  entirely  devoted  to  reactionary 
literature;  and  there  in  the  window,  along  with 
books  recommending  the  restoration  of  the  mon- 
archy, was  the  volume  of  M.  Lasserre  and  other 
anti-romantic  publications.  Now  I  for  one  regret 
that  a  legitimate  protest  against  certain  tendencies 
of  nineteenth-century  life  and  literature  should  be 
thus  mixed  up  with  what  we  may  very  well  deem 
an  impossible  political  and  religious  reaction.  A 
movement  would  seem  needed  that  shall  be  some- 
what less  negative  and  more  genuinely  constructive 
than  the  one  M.  Lasserre  and  his  friends  are  trying 
to  start  in  France ;  a  movement  that  shall  preserve 
even  in  its  severest  questionings  of  the  nineteenth 
century  a  certain  balance  and  moderation,  a  certain 
breadth  of  knowledge  and  sympathy,  and  so  seem 
an  advance  and  not  a  retrogression.  But  with  this 
reservation  we  must  recognize  that  M.  Lasserre' s 
attack  on  the  romantic  and  naturalistic  point  of 
view  is  very  timely.  With  the  spread  of  impres- ,  s^ 
sionism  literature  has  lost  standards  and  discipline, 
and  at  the  same  time  virility  and  seriousness  ;  it  has 
fallen  into  the  hands  of  aesthetes  and  dilettantes, 
the  last  effete  representatives  of  romanticism,  who 
[  xiii  ] 


i 


PREFACE 

have  proved  utterly  unequal  to  the  task  of  maintain- 
ing its  great  traditions  against  the  scientific  posi- 
tivists.  The  hope  of  the  humanities  is  in  defenders 
who  will  have  something  of  Lessing's  virile  em- 
phasis on  action,  and  scorn  of  mere  revery, — who 
will  not  be  content  with  wailing  more  or  less  melo- 
diously from  their  towers  of  ivory. 

Much  that  I  have  said  in  this  book  is  a  develop- 
ment of  what  I  have  already  said  in  my  book  on 
"  Literature  and  the  American  College,"  especially 
of  the  definition  I  have  there  attempted  of  the  word 
humanism.  Many  of  the  views,  again,  that  are  ex- 
pressed in  the  following  pages,  on  the  romantic 
movement,  will  need  to  be  more  fully  developed, 
and  this  I  hope  to  do  at  some  future  time  in  a 
book  to  be  entitled  "  Rousseau  and  Romanticism." 
I  should  add  that  for  the  last  eight  or  ten  years  I 
have  been  giving  the  main  conclusions  of  the  pre- 
sent volume  to  the  students  of  one  of  my  Harvard 
courses. 

Cambridge,  Massachusetts, 
March  15,  19 10. 


PART   I 

THE  PSEUDO-CLASSIC  CONFUSION 
OF  THE  ARTS 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

CHAPTER   I 

THE   THEORY   OF   IMITATION 

It  is  rare  to  read  through  a  critical  treatise  on  either 
art  or  literature,  written  between  the  middle  of  the 
sixteenth  and  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
without  finding  an  approving  mention  of  the  Hora- 
tian  simile,  "as  is  painting,  so  is  poetry  "  {ut pictura 
poesis) ;  or,  if  the  mention  is  not  of  Horace,  then 
it  is  of  the  equivalent  saying  of  Simonides  that 
"  painting  is  mute  poetry,  and  poetry  a  speaking  pic- 
ture." "There  is  no  one,"  writes  Father  Mambrun 
in  1652,  reviewing  the  critical  literature  of  a  cen- 
tury or  more,  "  who  has  not  been  pleased  with  this 
comparison  between  poetry  and  painting."  '  Toward 
the  beginning  of  the  neo-classical  period  the  saying 
of  Simonides  is  perhaps  more  in  favor,  toward  the  end, 
that  of  Horace ;  but  throughout  the  period  the  assimi- 

'  Dissertatio  peripatetica   de   epico   carmine^   p.  41.   See   also 
p.  284. 

[3] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

lation  of  poetry  to  painting  that  both  sayings  are 
supposed  to  justify,  is  insisted  on  as  fundamental. 

Fundamental,  however,  as  was  the  doctrine  ut 
pictu7-a  poesis,  it  was  only  as  the  corollary  of  a  doc- 
trine still  more  fundamental.  To  understand  what 
this  doctrine  is,  we  need  to  go  back  to  the  begin- 
nings of  the  whole  movement  in  the  Italian  Renais- 
sance. We  can  there  follow  the  steps  by  which,  in 
a  comparatively  short  time,  two  documents,  Horace's 
so-called  "Ars  Poetica  "  and  Aristotle's  "Poetics," 
acquired  a  supreme  authority  in  criticism.  The  im- 
mense influence  of  Horace  was  in  the  main  bene- 
ficial, though  it  made  for  an  excellent  prose  rather 
than  an  excellent  poetry.  It  found  its  consummation 
in  seventeenth-century  France,'  where  it  contributed 
with  other  influences  to  the  creating  of  modern 
French  prose,  —  an  achievement  artistically  so  great 
that  other  nations  sometimes  seem  to  have  attained 
a  tradition  of  sound  prose  only  in  so  far  as  they 
have  learned  from  the  French.  Not  even  the  in- 
genuity of  a  multitude  of  commentators  succeeded 

'  I  am  of  course  counting  Boileau  among  the  influences  that 
made  for  a  sound  prose.  Boileau  was  about  one  part  Aristotle  to 
nine  parts  Horace. 

[4] 


THE  THEORY  OF  IMITATION 

in  obscuring  seriously  the  Horatian  good  sense ;  or 
if  Horace  was  ever  given  a  twist,  it  was,  as  in  the 
case  of  the  dictum  ut  pictiira  poesis,  through  the 
over-eagerness  of  the  commentators  to  read  into 
him  an  Aristotelian  or  pseudo- Aristotelian  meaning. 
The  contrast  in  this  respect  between  Horace  and 
Aristotle  may  be  inferred  from  the  very  title-page 
of  the  first  modern  commentary  on  the  "Poetics," 
that  of  Robortello  (1548),  where  the  "Poetics"  is 
proclaimed  "  a  most  difficult  and  obscure  book,  not 
previously  elucidated  by  any  one."  Robortello  goes 
on  to  say  in  his  preface  that  it  had  always  been 
held  among  scholars  that  Aristotle's  "  Poetics  "  was 
so  hard  that  nobody  could  understand  it,  and  that 
therefore  he  was  fearful  lest  he  should  be  thought 
guilty  of  presumption  and  conceit  in  trying  to  ex- 
plain it  at  all.  He  then  hazards  the  conjecture  that 
Aristotle  wrote  so  obscurely  in  order  that  he  might 
deter  slow-witted  and  indolent  men  from  reading 
him,  at  the  same  time  that  he  stimulated  and  de- 
lighted the  ingenious.  Accordingly,  the  ingenious 
set  their  wits  to  work  on  the  "  Poetics  "  and  pro- 
ceeded to  turn  out  those  formidable  editions  of  the 
later  Renaissance,  where  a  slender  rivulet  of  text 
[5] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

is  almost  lost  in  the  wide  expanse  of  commentary. 
Goethe  remarks  that  the  "Poetics"  has  almost 
always  done  harm  when  interpreted  apart  from  the 
general  spirit  of  Aristotle's  teaching  as  revealed 
in  his  other  writings.  Yet  even  when  thus  inter- 
preted the  "  Poetics  "  contains  so  much  that  is  pro- 
found and  essential,  that  in  spite  of  its  fragmentary 
and  uncertain  text,  its  dryness  and  logic-chopping, 
the  evil  it  wrought  could  not  fail  to  be  strangely 
mingled  with  the  good.  For  example,  in  several  of 
his  plays  Racine  has  attained  not  simply  a  regularity 
of  structure,  but  an  actual  perfection  of  dramatic 
technique  that  is  unsurpassed  in  ancient  or  modern 
literature ;  and  we  should  remember  how  minutely 
Racine  studied  a  work  like  that  of  Heinsius  ("  De 
Tragoediae  Constitutione,"  1611),  which  is  itself 
only  a  quintessence  of  the  Aristotelian  lore  of  the 
Renaissance. 

Having  granted  thus  much,  we  must  recognize 
what  an  opportunity  the  "Poetics"  gave  pedants 
who  wished  to  forge  an  instrument  for  tyrannizing 
over  the  individual  conscience  in  matters  of  taste. 
As  a  body,  these  Italian  critics  are  endlessly  theo- 
retical ;  they  are  often  as  repellent  in  form  and  ab- 
[6] 


THE  THEORY   OF   IMITATION 

stract  in  substance  as  many  of  the  German  writers 
on  aesthetics  of  the  nineteenth  century.  They  strike 
one  as  the  kind  of  men  who,  a  couple  of  centuries 
earUer,  would  have  been  scholastic  philosophers,  and 
now  that  Aristotle's  authority  was  waning  in  other 
fields,  were  trying  to  impose  it  on  art  and  literature. 
They  carry  into  criticism  the  spirit  of  casuistry  that 
was  receiving  a  fresh  impulse  from  the  Counter- 
Reformation  and  the  activities  of  the  Jesuits.  In 
fact,  the  more  the  neo-classical  movement  is  studied, 
the  more  one  whole  side  of  it  is  seen  to  be  merely 
the  expression  in  matters  artistic  and  literary  of  the 
Jesuitical  spirit.  Just  as  the  Jesuits,  in  order  to 
strengthen  and  centralize  the  principle  of  authority, 
were  ready  to  multiply  their  minute  rulings  on  moral 
"  cases  "  even  at  the  risk  of  suppressing  spontaneity 
in  the  religious  life  and  arriving  at  a  pure  formal- 
ism, so  the  Aristotelian  commentators  exercised  a 
centralizing  influence  on  literature  and  tended  to 
substitute  purely  formal  precepts  for  spontaneous 
opinions.  We  may  push  the  analogy  still  further. 
Just  as  the  Jesuits  were  very  lenient  to  those  who 
once  accepted  the  outer  authority,  even  if  they  lacked 
the  ardor  of  inner  piety,  so  the  literary  casuists  held 
[7] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

out  to  those  who  obeyed  the  "rules"  the  hope  that 
they  would  be  able  to  write  a  good  epic  or  tragedy, 
let  us  say,  even  if  they  lacked  any  special  inspira- 
tion.^ 

The  far-ranging  speculations  of  the  Renaissance 
about  the  end  of  poetry,  decorum,  probability,  the 
laws  of  tragedy,  epic,  etc.,  tended,  then,  under  the 
influence  of  the  literary  casuists,  toward  a  pure  for- 
malism ;  and  when  we  examine  more  closely  we  dis- 
cover that  the  means  used  for  thus  exalting  ques- 
tions of  form  and  neglecting  what  we  should  call 
■nowadays  the  subjective  side  of  art,  was  a  certain 
idea  of  imitation.  We  have  come  at  last  to  the  doc- 
trine we  set  out  in  search  of,  which  dominates  the 
whole  neo-classical  movement,  and  of  which  nt  pic- 
tura  poesis  itself  is  but  a  corollary.  "  Poetry,"  says 
Fenelon  in  his  letter  to  the  French  Academy,  "  is 
doubtless  an  imitation  and  a  painting."  Imitation  is 
the  great  word  on  which  everything  hinges  and  to 
which  everything  must  be  made  to  conform.    On 

'  Chapelain,  for  example,  says  that  he  hoped  to  show  in  La 
Pucelle  that  one  who  possessed  the  theory  of  the  epic  "  might 
•without  any  special  elevation  of  mind  put  it  successfully  into 
practice." 

[8] 


THE  THEORY  OF  IMITATION 

reading  the  title  of  the  Abb6  Batteux's  "  Beaux-Arts 
reduits  a  un  meme  principe"  (1747),  we  may  be  sure 
in  advance  that  the  single  principle  to  which  he  re- 
duces all  the  arts  is  that  of  imitation.  Now  in  giving 
this  all-important  r61e  to  imitation  the  neo-classicists, 
from  the  Italians  of  the  sixteenth  century  to  the 
Abbe  Batteux,  were  up  to  a  certain  point  true  Ar- 
istotelians. Imitation  is  the  pivotal  word  of  the 
"Poetics."  For  Aristotle  poetry  not  only  imitates, 
but  it  imitates  human  actions,  and  not  at  random, 
but  with  reference  to  a  definite  plan  or  purpose : 
the  poet  is  to  turn  away  from  himself  and  his  own 
emotions,  and  work  like  the  painter,  with  his  eye  on 
the  object.  Aristotle,  in  short,  would  have  the  poet  . 
intensely  objective,  but  he  would  not  therefore  fix  '-^ 
him  in  a  rut  of  convention  and  traditionalism ;  yet 
it  is  in  this  latter  direction,  as  we  all  know,  that  the 
neo-classic  and  pseudo-classic  theorists  tended. 

To  understand  how,  while  claiming  to  follow 
Aristotle,  these  theorists  really  became  pseudo-Aris- 
totelian, we  must  consider  certain  other  important 
aspects  of  the  idea  of  imitation.  The  artist,  says 
Aristotle,  should  imitate  things  not  as  they  are  but 
as  they  ought  to  be.  He  should  give  us  truth,  but  a 

[9] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

N,/  selected  truth,  raised  above  all  that  is  local  and  acci- 
dental, purged  of  all  that  is  abnormal  and  eccentric, 
so  as  to  be  in  the  highest  sense  representative.  He 
should  improve  upon  Nature  with  means  drawn  from 
Nature  herself.  Nature,  in  Dante's  phrase,  is  like  a 
great  workman  whose  hand  trembles,'  and  the  artist 
should  strive  to  realize  this  deeper  purpose,  which 
Nature  suggests  but  does  not  actually  fulfil.  Prob- 
ably the  first  mention  in  modern  times  of  this  pro- 
found and  obscure  doctrine  of  ideal  imitation  is 
that  found  in  the  "Poetics"  of  Daniello^  (1536); 
and  it  is  significant  that  Daniello's  interpretation  of 
the  doctrine  is  already  badly  twisted..  History  for 
example  differs  from  poetry,  according  to  Daniello, 
not  as  a  lower  form  of  truth  from  a  higher  and 
more  representative  form,  but  as  fact  from  fiction. 
We  are  going  to  see  later  that  this  notion  of  poetry 
as  an  agreeable  falsity,  united  with  the  confusion  of 
poetry  and  painting  in  its  pseudo-classic  form  to 
encourage  the  kind  of  poetical  diction  that  Words- 
worth attacked  in  English.  One  point  should  be 
noted  in  passing :  the  painters  and  those  who  theo- 
rized about  painting  arrived  at  a  clearer  idea  of 

'  Par.,  .XIII,  V.  76.  '  La  Poetica,  p.  41. 

[10] 


THE  THEORY  OF  IMITATION 

Aristotle's  meaning  than  the  writers  and  literary- 
theorists.'  The  "  Discourses  on  Art "  of  Sir  Joshua 
Reynolds,  perhaps  the  best  statement  of  the  classical 
point  of  view  in  English,  are  no  accident,  but  have 
behind  them  a  long  and  in  many  respects  a  sound 
tradition^  extending  back  to  the  Italian  Renais- 
sance. 

At  all  events,  the  writers  did  finally  come  to  un- 
derstand thus  much  of  Aristotle's  meaning,  —  that 
they  were  not  to  imitate  ordinary  nature  but  a  se- 
lected and  embellished  nature  {la  belle  nature  as  the 
French  critics  termed  it).  But  with  reference  to 
what  model  or  standard  were  they  to  select  in  ar- 

'  My  own  impression  in  this  matter  has  been  confirmed  by 
reading  the  very  careful  study  by  Mr.  W.  G.  Howard  of  the 
maxim  ut pictura poesis,  especially  as  used  by  the  painters.  (See 
Publications  of  the  Modern  Language  Association  of  America,  xxiv, 
pp.  40-123.)  Mr.  Howard  has  embodied  the  main  points  of  this 
paper  in  the  edition  of  the  Laokoon  that  he  is  just  publishing 
(Henry  Holt  &  Co.,  New  York),  and  that  I  regret  not  having  been 
able  to  use. 

*  Reynolds  was  initiated  into  this  tradition  not  only  by  his 
residence   in   Italy    (1749-52),   but   by  reading  such   works   as  \ 
Dryden's  translation  of  Du   Fresnoy's  De  Arte  Graphica  with  i 
the  introductory  "  Parallel  of  Poetry  and  Painting"  (1695).   Rey- 
nolds took  serious  exception  to  the  theory  of  imitation.  See  Dis- 
course xiiL 

[II] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

riving  at  their  ideal  imitation?  If  they  selected  with 
reference  to  an  image  of  perfection  in  the  mind, 
they  invited  the  reader  or  beholder  likewise  to  look 
within  in  estimating  the  justness  of  the  imitation. 
But  to  do  this  would  for  the  neo-classicist  be  to  lose 
himself  in  the  vaguely  subjective ;  it  would  be  to 
i  set  up  an  inner  rather  than  an  outer  norm,  the  one 
thing  above  all  he  was  trying  to  avoid.  Why  not 
get  around  the  whole  difficulty,  and  at  the  same 
time  show  proper  humility,  by  foregoing  the  attempt  . 
to  imitate  Nature  directly,  and  imitating  rather  those 
great  writers  in  whom  the  voice  of  universal  tradi- 
tion tells  us  we  find  her  idealized  image  ? '  Little  | 
need  to  go  directly  to  nature,  says  Scaliger,  when 
we  have  in  Virgil  a  second  nature.^  The  writer  does 
not  need  to  chase  an  elusive  image  of  perfection  in 

'  An  argument  similar  to  the  one  I  have  outlined  here  will  be 
found  at  the  beginning  of  Partenio's  work  De  Poetica  Imitatione 
(Venice,  1565). 

^  "  Haec  omnia,  quae  imiteris,  habes  apud  alteram  naturam,  id 
est,  Virgilium."  Scaliger,  Poetices  lib.  Ill,  cap.  iv.  Virgil,  as 
Pope  tells  ns  {^Essay  on  Criticism),  looked  for  his  Nature  to 
Homer :  — 

But  when  t'  examine  ev'ry  part  he  came, 
Nature  and  Homer  were,  he  found,  the  same,  etc. 

[12] 


THE  THEORY  OF   IMITATION 

his  own  mind,  but  merely  to  copy  Virgil ;  and  the 
reader  is  also  saved  the  trouble  of  looking  within, 
and  has  merely  to  compare  Virgil  with  the  copy. 

There  is  thus  added  to  the  various  real  and  sup- 
posed meanings  of  the  word  imitation  in  Aristotle 
a  meaning  that  is  comparatively  un-Aristotelian,  — 
the  imitation  of  models.  Reserving  for  separate  dis- 
cussion one  especially  important  result  of  this  com- 
ing together  of  the  Aristotelian  and  un-Aristotelian 
meaning  of  the  word  imitation,  we  need  simply  note 
here  how  fully  attention  was  thus  turned  toward 
the  formal  element  of  art  and  away  from  the  ele- 
ment of  personal  feeling.  Aristotle  himself  had 
said  that  metre,  in  which  the  musical  throb  of  emo- 
tion is  most  distinctly  felt,  is  not  of  the  essence  of 
poetry :  its  essence  is  rather  in  imitation,  —  not  of 
the  ordinary  facts  of  life,  but  of  those  facts  selected 
and  arranged,  as  Aristotle  would  say,  in  what  one 
is  tempted  to  call  his  own  special  jargon,  "  accord- 
ing to  probability  or  necessity." 

This  theory  of  imitation  does  not  work  so  badly 

for  the  drama,  to  which  Aristotle  specially  applies  it, 

being  as  it  is  the  most  objective  of  the  literary  forms, 

—  the  form  that  benefits  most  by  strict  motivation 

[13] 


THE  NEW   LAOKOON 

and  logical  structure.  But  even  the  pseudo-classicists 
felt  the  difficulty  of  making  the  theory  work  equally 
well  for  other  literary  forms,  —  lyrical  poetry  for 
instance :  how  was  it  possible  to  look  on  lyrical  poetry 
as  turned  entirely  to  the  painting  of  some  outer 
object,  and  to  sever  the  bond  that  connects  it  with 
individual  emotion  ?  "  People  may  protest  as  fol- 
lows," says  the  Ahh6  Batteux :  "'What!  ...  Is 
not  poetry  a  song  inspired  by  joy,  admiration,  grati- 
tude ?  Is  it  not  a  cry  of  the  heart,  an  enthusiasm 
{elan)  in  which  Nature  does  everything  and  Art 
nothing  .-•  I  do  not  see  in  it  any  painting  or  picture 
—  but  only  fire,  feeling,  intoxication.  So  two  things 
are  true :  first,  lyrical  poetry  is  true  poetry  ;  second, 
it  is  not  an  imitation.'  "  ' 

We  can  agree  with  Batteux  when  he  adds : 
"  Here  is  the  objection  presented  in  all  its  force." 
We  need  not  follow  the  process  by  which  he  gets 
around  the  objection  and  proceeds  to  prove  that 
lyrical  poetry  is  only  imitation  after  all ;  though  this 
process  would  illustrate  in  a  very  interesting  way  the 
pseudo-classic  attempt  to  discredit  the  spontaneous 
in  favor  of  the  formal,  to  identify  art  with  artificiality. 

'  Beaux-Arts,  etc.,  p.  244. 
[14] 


THE   THEORY   OF   IMITATION 

He  does,  however,  admit  that  the  prophets,  being  as 
they  were  directly  inspired  by  God,  did  not  have  to 
imitate.  This  is  of  course  to  admit  a  great  deal.  The 
true  romantic  poet,  the  wild-eyed  magus  of  Victor 
Hugo  {mage  effard),  feels  in  his  inspired  moments 
that  he  is  at  least  on  a  level  with  the  prophets,  if 
not  with  God  himself. 

When  Batteux  published  his  book,  Rousseau 
was  on  the  point  of  beginning  his  warfare  in  the 
name  of  feeling  against  everything  formal  and 
,  traditional.  In  his  exaltation  of  feeling,  Rousseau's 
method  was  to  grope  his  way  back  to  beginnings  and 
to  use  to  the  utmost  the  argument  of  origins.  Bat- 
teux already  thinks  it  necessary  to  refer  to  and  refute 
this  appeal  to  origins.  We  should  not,  he  says,  go 
back  to  the  first  state  of  the  arts,  the  mere  lispings 
of  infancy,  when  we  are  trying  to  define  what  they 
should  be  in  their  state  of  perfection.'  At  least  pass- 
ing mention  should  be  made  of  an  earlier  use  against 
the  Aristotelians  of  the  argument  of  origins.  While 
the  theory  of  imitation  was  still  incubating  in  Italy, 
Patrizzi  ^  protested  against  the  critics  who  were  thus 

'  Beaux-Arts,  etc.,  p.  246. 

*  See  La  Deca  Disputata,  Ferrara,  1 586. 

[IS] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

weaving  a  strait- jacket  for  poetry,  and  tending 
to  stifle  spontaneity  under  formalism.  Poetry,  says 
Patrizzi,  took  its  rise  in  religious  enthusiasm,  rhythm 
is  essential  to  its  being ;  it  is  not  primarily  an  imi- 
tation. It  would  be  possible  to  quote  from  him  pas-' 
sages  that  seem  to  anticipate  Wordsworth's  definition 
of  poetry  :  "  the  spontaneous  overflow  of  powerful 
feelings  "  ;  passages  that  even  remind  one  of  the 
more  recent  Rousseauists,  who  delve  in  the  depths 
of  the  primitive  and  seek  for  the  origins  of  poetry  in 
the  rhythmic  beat  of  communal  sympathy.  But  such 
passages  would  be  misleading  :  Patrizzi  is  a  Platonist 
rather  than  a  precursor  of  Rousseauism ;  that  is,  he 
/^associates  the  beginnings  of  poetry  with  what  is 
above  the  reason,  rather  than  with  the  region  of 
instinct  that  is  below  it. 

By  his  radical  departure  from  Aristotle,  Patrizzi 
became  the  arch-dissenter  of  Renaissance  criticism. 
Many  persons  had  a  sort  of  startled  admiration  for  his 
enormous  heresies,  but  he  cannot  be  said  to  have 
been  deeply  influential.  On  the  contrary,  the  ten- 
dency was  to  lose  sight  more  and  more  of  the  roots 
of  poetry  in  emotion  and  to  identify  it  formally  with 
painting  through  the  interpretations  that  were  given 
[i6] 


THE  THEORY   OF   IMITATION 

to  the  word  imitation.  Let  us  make  this  point  clear 
by  quoting  still  further  the  Abb6  Batteux.  After  re- 
ducing, as  we  have  seen,  all  the  forms  of  poetry, 
even  the  lyric,  to  imitation,  Batteux  goes  on  as  fol- 
lows :  "  And  so  whether  poetry  sings  the  emotions 
of  the  heart,  or  acts,  or  narrates,  or  sets  either  gods 
or  men  to  speaking,  it  is  always  a  portrait  of  general 
nature  {la  belle  natzcre),  an  artificial  image,  a  picture, 
the  one  and  only  merit  of  which  consists  in  right 
selection,  arrangement,  true  likeness :  ut  pictura 
poesisy 

Though  the  Horatian  phrase  thus  recurs  inevi- 
tably when  the  pseudo-classicist  reaches  a  certain 
stage  in  his  theorizing,  the  developments  he  gave 
to  the  phrase  are  evidently  not  to  be  found  in  the 
shrewd  and  untheoretical  Horace,  However  little 
Aristotle  himself  would  have  countenanced  the 
pseudo-classic  confusions  of  poetry  and  painting, 
the  point  of  departure  of  these  confusions  is  evi- 
dently not  merely  in  the  general  interpretation  that 
was  given  to  the  "Poetics,"  but  in  certain  specific 
passages  :  for  example,  where  he  says  that  the  "  poet 
is  an  imitator  like  a  painter  or  any  other  artist,"  or 
where  he  proves  the  superior  importance  of  plot 
[17] 


THE  NEW   LAOKOON 

over  other  elements  in  dramatic  poetry  by  remark- 
ing that  the  most  beautiful  colors  laid  on  confusedly 
will  not  give  as  much  pleasure  as  the  chalk  outline 
of  a  portrait.  Plot  in  writing  thus  corresponds  to 
design  in  painting.  Neo-classical  critics  are  fond  of 
discussing  the  elements  in  the  art  of  writing  that 
correspond  to  the  other  elements  in  pictorial  art,  — 
light,  color,  expression,  etc.,  —  though  they  are 
not  always  agreed  as  to  these  correspondencies. 
They  did,  however,  finally  reach  a  fair  agreement  as 
to  what  constitutes  the  element  of  poetical  coloring. 
This  conception  of  poetical  coloring,  arising  as  we 
have  seen  from  the  Aristotelian  doctrine  of  imita- 
tion, finally  united  with  the  other  or  un-Aristotelian 
doctrine,  i.  e.,  the  imitation  of  models,  to  encourage ' 
the  poetical  diction  which  Wordsworth  attacked  in 
English,  but  the  equivalent  of  which  is  found  in 
other  European  languages.^  Inasmuch  as  this  impor- 
tant result  of  the  pseudo- classic,  or,  as  we  may 
term  it,  formal  confusion  of  poetry  and  painting,  has 

'  Poetical  diction  ■was  also  encouraged  by  the  whole  theory  of 
"ornament "  that  had  come  down  from  classical  antiquity.  See 
B.  Croce,  Estetica,  pp.  70-76,  450-4C5. 

^  For  French,  see  E.  Barat :  Le  style  poHiquf  et  la  revolution 
romantique  ( 1904). 

[18] 


THE  THEORY   OF   IMITATION 

not  been  adequately  noticed  by  Lessing,  nor  so  far 
as  I  am  aware  by  any  other  critic,  it  may  here  re- 
ceive the  separate  discussion  for  which  we  have 
already  reserved  it. 


CHAPTER  II 

POETICAL  DICTION 

Something  has  already  been  said  of  the  bad  twist 
that  was  given  to  Aristotle's  doctrine  of  ideal  imita- 
tion as  early  as  Daniello :  poetry  is  to  differ  from 
prose,  not  as  a  higher  from  a  lower  truth  but  as 
fiction  from  fact.  Inasmuch  as  men  are  always  more 
or  less  the  victims  of  words,  this  view  of  poetry  was 
encouraged  by  Aristotle's  word  for  plot  (fxv6o<:), 
which  was  rendered  "  fable."  At  first  sight  this 
emphasis  on  the  fabulous  and  fictitious  seems  an  in- 
vitation to  the  poet  to  mount  the  hippogriff ;  but 
the  neo-classical  hippogriff  is  tied  to  a  tether.  No 
sooner  has  the  poet  accepted  the  invitation  to  in- 
dulge himself  freely  in  fiction,  than  he  is  confronted 
with  the  terrible  phrase  "according  to  probability 
or  necessity."  He  is  to  be  a  liar,  it  is  true,  but 
a  logical  liar ;  for,  as  Rymer  says,  "  What  is  more 
hateful  than  an  improbable  lie  ? "  The  neo-classical 
theorist  is  not  willing  to  recognize  that  the  imagina- 

[20] 


POETICAL  DICTION 

tion  has  its  own  reasons  of  which  the  reason  knows 
nothing;  that  there  are  other  ways  of  making  a 
thing  probable,  or  convincing  as  we  should  say  now- 
adays, besides  merely  appealing  to  one's  logic  and 
sense  of  fact ;  for  this  would  be  to  recognize  that 
region  of  the  spontaneous  and  unexpected  in  human 
nature  which  he  is  doing  his  best  to  eliminate.  Every- 
thing must  be  deliberate  and  prearranged,  with  no 
break  in  the  sharp  sequence  of  cause  and  effect. 
To  be  sure,  there  was  one  obstacle  to  thus  making 
poetry  purely  rational  and  formal.  Ancient  authori- 
ties whom  the  neo-classicist  was  bound  to  respect  had 
declared  that  poetry  has  nothing  to  do  with  reason- 
ing, but  is  a  sort  of  divine  madness ;  and  so,  in  an 
age  of  formalism,  poetic  fury  itself  became  a  formal 
requirement  —  something  to  turn  on  judiciously, 
about  as  one  might  turn  on  a  tap.  Few  things 
are  more  amusing  than  the  businesslike  way  in 
which  the  neo-classic  poet  speaks  of  his  "rages" 
and  his  "fires."  Some  of  the  critics,  even  though 
they  have  to  2L.ccQ^t  furor poeticiis,  strive  at  least  to 
keep  it  within  narrow  limits.  Thus  Father  Mambrun 
says  that  the  epic  poet  must  not  be  furious  in  the 
constitution  of  his  plot,  though  he  "  does  not  deny 

[21] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

that  a  little  poetic  fury  may  be  sprinkled  in  in  the 
episodes." ' 

In  their  attempt  to  deny  the  rights  of  the  imagi- 
nation the  neo-classical  theorists  —  or  rather  let  us 
call  them  Jesuitical  casuists  —  were  led  to  convert 
the  divine  illusion  of  poetry  into  an  agreeable  falsity. 
Even  in  creating  his  fictions,  or  it  might  be  more 
correct  to  say  in  manufacturing  his  lies,  since  he 
was  supposed  to  do  everything  with  malice  prepense, 
the  poet  was  not  to  imitate  directly,  that  is,  rely  on 
his  own  resources  ;  for  he  might  thus  expose  himself 
to  being  called  "  monstrous,"  the  word  that  the  neo- 
classicist  always  had  in  reserve  for  any  one  who  was 
too  unexpected.  The  poet  was  rather  to  fall  back 
on  the  second  main  form  of  imitation,  the  imitation 
of  models,  and  to  copy  the  fictions  that  are  already 
found  in  the  ancient  poets ;  in  other  words,  he  was 
to  draw  freely  on  the  wardrobe  of  mythological 
frippery,  and  many  of  the  theorists  demanded  that 
he  should  not  use  even  this  fiction  for  its  own  sake, 
but  merely  allegorically,  to  inculcate  some  moral 
truth. 

The  poet,  then,  is  an  imitator,  and  a  painter  who 

'  op.  cit.,  p.  269. 
[22] 


POETICAL   DICTION 

in  drawing  his  design,  that  is,  in  choosing  a  subject 
and  mode  of  treatment,  is  to  be  unspontaneous  and 
traditional.  He  is  also  to  be  unspontaneous  and 
traditional  in  laying  on  his  poetical  colors ;  and  by 
poetical  colors  the  neo-classicist  understands  words, 
elegant  phrases,  figures  of  speech,  and  the  like.' 
Horace  already  speaks  of  words  as  poetical  colors  * 
in  much  this  sense,  and  the  expression  is  found 
even  in  Wordsworth.  Both  words  and  imagery  are 
regarded  by  the  neo-classicist  as  being  laid  on  like 
''  pigments  from  the  outside.  They  are  not,  in  Words- 
worthian  phrase,  the  spontaneous  overflow  of  power- 
ful feelings ;  they  lack  the  vital  thrill  that  would 
save  them  from  artificiality.  The  result  might  not 
have  been  so  bad  if  the  poet  had  painted  with  his 
eye  on  the  object.    But  at  this   point    the    other 

*  Batteux  says  that  "  les  mesures  et  Tharmonie  "  constitute  the 
coloring  of  poetry,  "  I'imitation,"  its  design  {Op.  cit.,  pp.  144,  146). 
The  usual  point  of  view  is  that  of  A.  Donatus  in  his  Ars  poetica 
(Cologne,  1633) :  "  Colores  enira  poetici  verba  sunt  et  locutiones," 
etc.  Dryden  Includes  in  poetical  coloring,  "  the  words,  the  ex- 
pressions, the  tropes  and  figures,  the  versification,  and  all  the 
other  elegancies  of  sound,"  etc.    Essays,  Ker  ed.,  II,  p.  147. 

^  Cf.  Dryden  (Ker,  II,  p.  148)  :  ^^  Opertim  colores  is  the  very 
word  which  Horace  uses  to  signify  words  and  elegant  expres- 
sions," etc. 

[23] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

theory  of  imitation  intervened,  and  in  supplying  his 
palette  with  poetical  colors  (that  is,  words,  happy 
phrases,  figures  of  speech,  etc.),  he  must  not  look  to 
nature  but  to  models.  Wordsworth '  and  Coleridge 
both  say  that  the  habit  of  regarding  the  language  of 
poetry  as  something  dissociated  from  personal  emo- 
tion, and  as  made  up  rather  of  words  and  flowers  of 
speech  culled  from  models,  was  promoted  by  the 
writing  of  Greek  and  Latin  verse  in  school.  To  any 
one  who  composed  by  piecing  together  words  and 
phrases  he  had  picked  out  of  a  gradus,  poetry  came 
to  seem,  even  in  his  own  tongue,  an  artificial  process. 
Johnson  praises  Dryden  as  the  father  of  poetical 
diction  in  English,  and  Dryden  is  reprobated  for 
the  same  reason  by  Lowell.  It  is,  of  course,  true 
that  poetical  diction  came  in  with  the  whole  French 
influence  about  the  time  of  Dryden.  It  is  also  true 

*  Wordsworth  says  that  he  was 

Misled  in  estimating  words,  not  only 

By  common  inexperience  of  youth, 

But  by  the  trade  in  classic  niceties, 

The  dangerous  craft  of  culling  term  and  phrase 

From  languages  that  want  the  living  voice 

To  carry  meaning  to  the  natural  heart,  etc. 

Prcludt,  vi.  107  S. 

Cf.  also  Coleridge,  Biographia  Literaria,  ch.  i. 
[24] 


POETICAL  DICTION 

that  the  model  to  whom  the  average  poet  of  the 
eighteenth  century  turned  when  he  was  laying  in 
a  supply  of  poetical  pigments,  was  not  Dryden,  but 
Pope,  especially  the  translation  of  Homer,  Evidently 
two  things  were  needed  to  rid  poetry  of  *'  its  gaudi- 
ness  and  inane  phraseology  " :  first,  that  the  poet 
should  write  with  his  eye  on  the  object  and  not  on 
the  models  and  the  stock  of  traditional  poetical 
colors;  second,  that  he  should  be  spontaneous,  so 
that  his  every  word  and  phrase  might  be  saved  from 
artificiality  and  ring  responsive  to  genuine  feeling. 
The  first  of  these  two  requirements  was  fulfilled, 
in  England  at  least,  before  the  second.  For  ex- 
ample, the  "Nocturnal  Reverie"  of  Lady  Winchel- 
sea,  which  Wordsworth  praises,  is  more  remark- 
able for  its  exact  rendering  of  certain  sights  and 
sounds  of  nature  without  false  finery  or  flowers  of 
speech  than  it  is  for  the  true  romantic  thrill.  The 
same  may  be  said  of  Cowper  and  some  other  eigh- 
teenth-century poets.  But  poetic  diction  was  far  from 
being  discredited  by  an  occasional  performance  of 
this  kind.  There  is  no  more  flagrant  example  of  po- 
etic diction  than  Erasmus  Darwin's  "  Botanic  Gar- 
den "  ;  unless,  indeed,  it  be  the  early  poems  of  Wil- 
[25] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

liam  Wordsworth,  which  show  that  the  young  poet 
already  had  his  eye  on  the  object ;  but  they  are  none 
the  less  filled  with  artificial  elegancies  and  conven- 
tional adornments.'  For  Erasmus  Darwin  poetry  is 
a  process  of  painting  to  the  eye.  Both  his  theory  ^ 
and  practice  are  indeed  merely  the  ultimate  outcome 
of  a  confusion  of  poetry  and  painting  that  has  its 
origins  in  the  literary  casuistry  of  the  Renaissance. 
The  confusion  that  led  to  poetical  diction  is  funda- 
mental in  the  neo-classic  movement,  and  the  reaction 
against  poetical  diction  is  equally  fundamental  in 
romanticism.  The  romantic  movement  probably  did 
as  much  to  compromise  as  it  did  to  forward  the  stand- 
ards of  sound  prose ;  but  it  had  a  legitimate  task  in 
emancipating  the  poetic  imagination  from  its  strait- 
jacket  of  artificiality  and  convention.  It  is  therefore 
important  to  note  that  the  wave  of  emotion  that  '' 
finally  swept  away  poetical  diction  in  England  came 

*  Cf.  Legouis's  Wordsworth,  p.  131  ff. 

^  For  Darwin's  theory  of  poetry,  see  the  "  Interludes  "that  fol- 
low the  cantos  of  his  poem,  especially  the  "  Interlude  "  to  Canto  I 
of  Part  II  {The  Loz'cs  of  the  Plants,  1789).  The  acme  of  poetic 
artificiality  was  reached  in  France  about  the  same  time  as  in  Eng- 
land, in  the  Abbe  Delille's  Jardins  (1782),  a  work  inspired  by 
Thomson's  Seasons. 

[26] 


POETICAL  DICTION 

from  France.  "  Guilt  and  Sorrow,"  the  first  poem 
in  which  Wordsworth  attains  vital  directness  and  sin- 
cerity of  expression,  was  written,  not  primarily  under 
the  influences  of  the  ballads,  or  Milton,  or  Spenser, 
but  under  the  emotional  stress  of  the  French  Revo- 
lution ;  and  Wordsworth  is  the  father  of  nineteenth- 
century  English  poetry.  Certain  tendencies  in  eigh- 
teenth-century England,  that  bulk  so  largely  in  the 
eyes  of  some  critics  among  the  causes  of  the  Eng- 
lish romantic  movement,  still  have  about  them  some- 
thing that  is  conventional  and,  in  the  neo-classical 
sense,  imitative.  The  Spenserian  and  Miltonian  re- 
vivals, for  example,  led  simply  to  new  forms  of  poet- 
ical diction.  In  laying  in  their  assortment  of  poetical 
pigments  people  went  to  Spenser  and  Milton  instead 
of  to  Pope. 

My  purpose,  however,  is  not  to  go  into  a  minute 
study  of  poetical  diction.  I  have  merely  wanted  to 
show  how  inevitably  it  arose  from  the  formal  iden- 
tification, of  poetry  and  painting.  One  would  have 
expected  this  identification  to  lead  not  only  to  poetic 
diction,  but  to  a  general  riot  of  word-painting  and 
descriptive  writing;  as  a  matter  of  fact  the  possi- 
bilities of  the  theory  in  this  direction  were  slow  to 
[27] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

develop,  and  the  reason  is  not  far  to  seek.  Poetry, ' 
it  is  true,  is  an  imitation  and  a  painting,  but  a  paint- 
ing, the  orthodox  AristoteHan  theorist  would  hasten 
to  add,  not  of  outer  objects,  but  of  human  actions.  \ 
To  be  sure,  the  critics  were  from  the  start  not  en- 
tirely agreed  on  this  point.  If  we  consult  the  liter- 
ary case-books  of  the  later  Renaissance  and  early  sev- 
enteenth century,  we  shall  find  that  grave  authorities 
are  quoted,  much  as  they  might  be  in  the  Jesuitical 
case-books  in  theology,  on  both  sides  of  the  question 
as  to  what  the  poet  may  imitate.  Too  much  Aristote- 
lian rigor  in  interpreting  the  doctrine  of  imitation 
had  some  awkward  consequences.  If  poetry  could 
imitate  only  human  actions,  then  the  "Georgics" 
were  not  poetry,  and  yet  Virgil  was  the  supreme  neo- 
classical model !  Was  it  not  veneration  of  Virgil  that 
led  to  the  reversion  of  the  Aristotelian  decision  in 
so  grave  a  matter  as  the  relative  dignity  of  trag- 
edy and  epic  ?  It  seems  strange  to  us  that  men  of 
undoubted  intellectual  power,  like  the  best  of  the 
Renaissance  critics,  should  have  conducted  such 
purely  formal  inquiries.  The  subjective  test  is  alone  \ 
intelligible  for  us.  If  a  thing  really  "  finds  "  us,  we  \ 
do  not  worry  much  about  form  or  the  dignity  of 
[28] 


POETICAL  DICTION 

genre.  The  actual  appeal  of  a  work  of  art  "  sinks 
the  form,  as  of  Drama  or  Epic,"  says  Emerson,  **  out 
of  notice.  'T  is  like  making  a  question  concerning  the 
paper  on  which  a  king's  message  is  written."  But  our 
sense  of  superiority  should  be  tempered  by  the  reflec- 
tion that  the  neo-classic  formalism  was  closely  related 
to  a  virtue  —  the  love  of  clear  and  logical  distinc- 
tions; and  that  our  modern  appreciativeness  is  often 
only  the  amiable  aspect  of  a  fault  —  an  undue  toler- 
ance for  indeterminate  enthusiasms  and  vapid  emo- 
tionaUsm. 

The  love  of  clear  distinctions  and  sharply  defined 
types  led  the  neo-classic  writer  to  avoid  a  mixture 
that  his  theory  would  otherwise  have  permitted,  — 
that  of  the  poem  in  prose.  For  if  the  essence  of  po- 
etry is  not  in  metre  but  in  imitation,  why  not  imitate 
poetically  in  prose  "i  That  is,  paint  a  picture  of  life  not 
according  to  literal  fact,  of  course,  but  "  according 
to  probability  or  necessity."  Fenelon  must  have  gone 
through  some  such  reasoning  when  he  wrote  his 
"Telemaque,"  a  genuinely  neo-classic  prose-poem, 
only  remotely  related  to  the  poetical  prose  with 
which  the  romantic  movement  has  made  us  familiar. 
Yet  such  was  the  prejudice  in  favor  of  the  genre 
[29] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

tramJi^  ^^2X  "  Telemaque  "  did  not  escape  censure. 
In  Voltaire's  "  Temple  du  Goiit "  the  repentant 
Fenelon  is  made  to  confess  that  there  can  be  no 
true  poem  in  prose.' 

To  return  to  our  main  topic,  we  may  surmise  that 
the  comparative  lack  of  descriptive  writing  during 
the  early  part  of  the  neo-classical  period  was  due  in 
part  to  concentration  on  man  and  human  action,  and 
in  part  to  positive  critical  precept.  Boileau  is  only 
repeating  previous  critics  when  he  ridicules  those 
who  interrupt  the  course  of  a  narrative  to  indulge 
in  a  long-winded  description,  for  example,  of  some 
palace  and  its  grounds.  "  I  skip  twenty  pages  to 
get  to  the  end  of  it  all,"  says  Boileau,  "and  then 
escape  with  difficulty  through  the  garden."^    Early 

'  In  the  article  "Epopee"  (Diet. phtlosophique),  Voltaire  says: 
"  Pour  les  poemes  en  prose,  je  ne  sais  ce  que  c'est  que  ce 
monstre :  je  n'y  vois  que  I'impuissance  de  faire  des  vers,"  etc. 
Cf.,  however,  the  Abbe  Du  Bos  who  approves  of  the  prose  poem 
on  good  neo-classic  grounds  (Reflexions  critiques  sur  la  po'esie  et 
sur  la  peinture,  t.  I,  p.  510). 

^  Cf.  D'Aubignac,  Pratique  du  thedtre,  p.  51  :  "Mai  h.  propos 
le  poete  ferait  une  description  exacte  des  colonnes,  des  portiques, 
des  ornements  .  .  .  d'un  temple,"  etc.  Boileau  had  especially  in 
mind  in  his  satire  the  description  of  the  magic  palace  in  Canto  III 
of  Scudery's  Alaric  which  was  itself  suggested  by  previous  de- 
scriptions in  Ariosto,  etc. 

[30] 


POETICAL  DICTION 

in  the  eighteenth  century,  however,  we  can  ob- 
serve a  change.  There  were  already  beginning  to 
gather  beneath  the  smug  surface  of  neo-classic  for- 
malism those  emotional  elements  that  were  destined 
to  explode  toward  the  end  of  the  century.  The  age 
was  gradually  growing  less  humanistic  in  temper,  and 
becoming  more  interested,  both  scientifically  and 
sentimentally,  in  outer  nature.  A  notable  example 
of  the  latter  kind  of  interest  is  Thomson's  "Sea- 
sons." Whatever  it  may  be  in  itself,  considered  as 
an  influence,  Thomson's  "  Seasons  "  is  a  pseudo-clas- 
sical document.  It  led  to  a  school  of  descriptive  and 
pictorial  poetry,  but  pictorial  in  a  pseudo-classic 
sense,  —  that  is,  conceiving  of  words  and  phrases  as 
pigments  to  be  laid  on  from  without ;  and  this  school 
was  not  slow  to  justify  itself  by  an  appeal  to  the 
maxim  tit  pictiira  poesis. 

At  the  same  time  a  somewhat  different  influence 
was  also  tending  to  confuse  the  standards  of  paint- 
ing and  poetry.  We  hear  a  great  deal  in  England  in 
the  late  seventeenth  and  early  eighteenth  century 
of  the  virtuosi ^^  men  who  collected  anything  from 

'  An  interesting  article  on  the  virtuosi  by  N.  Pearson  will  be 
found  in  the  Nineteenth  Century  for  Nov.,  1909. 

[31] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

coins  to  butterflies,  and  were  endlessly  ridiculed  by 
the  wits  of  the  time  as  examples  of  meaningless  and 
random  curiosity.  The  bent  thus  revealed  for  pre- 
cise observation  and  classification  may  be  connected 
directly  with  the  founding  of  the  Royal  Society 
(1662),  and  in  a  more  general  way  with  the  Baconian 
tradition.  In  the  retrospect  we  can  see  that  some 
of  these  virtuosi  were  on  the  way  to  become  serious 
antiquaries,  and  that  the  antiquaries  in  turn  pre- 
pared the  way  for  Winckelmann  and  modern  archaeo- 
logy. Now  any  one  who  got  together  a  cabinet  of 
antiques  was  naturally  led  to  compare  the  treatment 
of  the  ancient  legends,  etc.,  in  art  with  the  treat- 
ment of  the  same  legends  by  the  poets ;  and  at 
this  point  there  intervened  the  inevitable  iit  pictura 
poesis,  reinforced  by  the  neo-classical  notion  that  no 
one  could  do  anything  without  copying  from  some 
one  else.  One  of  the  first  persons  who  encouraged 
this  sort  of  thing,  as  Lessing  complains,  was  Addi- 
son in  his  "  Dialogues  on  Medals  "  (1702). 

Perhaps  the  most  important  of  the  other  authors 

who  developed  a  parallelism  between  pictorial  and 

plastic  art  on  the  one  hand  and  poetry  on  the  other, 

were  Spence  in  his  "Polymetis"  (1747),  and  finally 

[32] 


POETICAL   DICTION 

Count  Caylus  in  his  "  Pictures  Drawn  from  Ho- 
mer" (1757).  Lessing  maintains  that  Spence's 
"  book  is  absolutely  intolerable  to  every  reader  of 
taste."  This  is  not  flattering  for  the  English  aris- 
tocracy of  the  period,  many  of  the  most  distinguished 
of  whom  appear  in  the  list  of  his  subscribers  and 
patrons.  The  general  suggestion  of  these  books  is 
that  the  standards  of  poetic  and  plastic  art  are  inter- 
changeable, and  that  any  good  poetical  picture  may 
profitably  be  treated  in  the  same  way  by  the  painter 
or  sculptor.  Spence,  for  example,  becomes  a  fair 
mark  for  Lessing  when  he  says  (page  311),  "  Scarce 
anything  can  be  good  in  a  poetical  description  which 
would  appear  absurd  if  represented  in  a  statue  or 
picture."  At  the  same  time,  if  we  study  these  writers 
directly,  we  shall  be  surprised  to  find  how  much 
more  sensible  they  are  than  we  should  ever  suppose 
from  Lessing's  attacks.  Caylus,  indeed,  anticipates 
Lessing  in  important  respects.  "  For  every  idea  that 
he  has  borrowed  from  Caylus,"  says  M.  Rocheblave, 
"  Lessing  bestows  upon  him  a  censure."  ' 

We  should  now  be  prepared  to  understand  the 
conditions  that  led  to  the  writing  of  the  "  Laokoon." 

'  Essai  sur  le  Cointe  de  Caylus,  par  S.  Rocheblave,  p.  220. 
[33] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

,  There  was  the  school  of  descriptive  poetry,  largely 
imitative  of  Thomson's  "  Seasons  " ;  there  were  also 
the  new  erudition  and  antiquarianism  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century,'  uniting  with  art  and  literature,  and, 
like  the  school  of  descriptive  poetry,  making  a  liberal 
use  of  the  maxim  tit  pictiira  pocsis.  The  general 
background  was  the  whole  theory  of  imitation  as 
elaborated  by  the  critics  of  the  Renaissance.  Of 
these  elements  the  theory  of  imitation  is  by  far 
the  most  important,  and  it  is  the  one  of  which  the 
Germans  in  general  have  said  the  least.^ 

'  For  this  revival  of  Greek  in  the  eighteenth  century  and  the 
coming  together  of  antiquarianism  and  literature,  see  L.  Bertrand: 
La  Fin  du  classicisme  et  U  retour  a  Fafitiqiie. 

^  For  the  period  immediately  preceding  Lessing,  F.  Braitmaier's 
book  {GeschichU  der  Poetise  hen  Theorie  und  Kritik  von  den  Dis- 
kursen  der  Maler  bis  auf  Lessing,  1888),  though  dull,  is  fairly  com- 
plete. 


CHAPTER   III 

LESSING  AND   THE   "LAOKOON" 

One  of  the  most  important  passages  in  Lessing  is 
that  in  which  he  defends  criticism  —  and  by  criti- 
cism he  means  the  setting  up  of  definite  standards 
and  a  rational  discipline  —  against  those  who  asserted 
that  it  suppressed  originality  and  genius.  In  this  pas- 
sage Lessing  declares  that  he  felt  in  himself  no  living 
fountain,  and  had  to  force  everything  out  of  himself 
by  "  pipes  and  pressure."  "  I  should  be  poor,  cold, 
short-sighted,"  he  continues,  "  if  I  had  not  learned  in 
a  measure  to  borrow  foreign  treasures,  to  warm  my- 
self at  foreign  fires,  and  to  strengthen  my  eyes  by 
the  glasses  of  art.  I  am  therefore  always  ashamed 
or  annoyed  when  I  hear  or  read  anything  in  dis- 
paragement of  criticism.  It  is  said  to  suppress  gen- 
ius, and  I  flattered  myself  I  had  gained  from  it  some- 
thing very  nearly  approaching  genius.  I  am  a  lame 
man  who  cannot  possibly  be  edified  by  abuse  of  his 
crutch." 

Lessing,  then,  according  to  his  own  estimate,  is 
[35] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

more  remarkable  for  his  powers  of  assimilation  than 
for  his  spontaneity.  The  more  one  studies  the  ma- 
terial that,  from  the  Renaissance  on,  prepared  the 
way  for  his  work,  —  not  to  speak  of  the  remoter 
classical  background,  —  noting  how  much  he  owes  not 
merely  to  those  with  whom  he  agrees,  but  even  to 
the  very  Frenchmen,  like  Voltaire,  whom  he  is  striv- 
ing to  discredit,  the  more  one  is  inclined  to  agree 
with  Lessing's  self-estimate;  the  more  especially 
one  studies  the  "  Laokoon  "  in  this  way,  the  less  it 
seems  to  contain  that  is  strictly  original.  Evidently, 
if  the  Germans  are  to  j  ustify  the  high  claims  they 
make  for  Lessing  as  a  critic,  they  must  rest  them 
on  other  grounds  than  his  intellectual  originality  or 
the  fineness  of  his  taste.  The  decisive  word  about 
Lessing  was  really  uttered  by  Goethe  :  We  may,  he 
said,  have  another  intelligence  like  Lessing,  but 
we  shallwaitJong_beforejeein_gL  another  such  char-  _ 
acter. 

Here  is  the  point  that  must  have  chief  emphasis 
in  any  right  praise  of  Lessing.  He  is  in  some  re- 
spects the  most  masculine  figure  Germany  has 
produced  since  Luther ;  and  without  being  too  fan- 
ciful one  may  follow  out  certain  analogies  between 
[36] 


LESSING   AND   THE   "LAOKOON" 

the  role  played  by  Luther  and  that  played  by  Les- 
sing  in  an  entirely  different  field.  Luther  protested 
against  a  Catholic  Church  that  had  colored  the  plain 
truth  of  Scripture  with  its  own  special  tradition, 
perverted  it  with  casuistry,  overlaid  it  with  false 
rites  and  ceremonies ;  even  so  Lessing  protested 
against  the  critical  creed  the  foundations_oLwhidi- 
were  laid  in  sixteenth-century  Italy,  but  whichjiad 
been  actually  elaborated  and  imposed  upoTLJLbg 
world  by  the  French,  so  as  to  become  a  sort  of 
Catholic  Church  of  literature,  an  orthodoxy  which 
seemed  to  Lessing  to  have  colored  sound  classical 
doctrine  with  its  own  special  tradition,  distorted 
it  with  casuistical  interpretations,  and  turned  the 
true  spirit  of  the  law  into  mere  artificial  rules  and 
conventions.  Just  as  Luther  again,  in  distinguish- 
ing true  Christianity  from  pseudo-Christianity,  was 
led  to  set  up  the  text  of  the  Bible  as  a  sort  of 
visible  absolute,  a  true  and  perfect  touchstone  in 
matters  religious,  so  Lgssing  in  distinguishing  be- 
tween  the  truly^^lassical  and  the  pseudo-classic  set 
up  Aristotle's  "  Poetics  "  as  a  sort  of  visible  abjo- 
lute,  a  complete  criterion  in  everything  relating  to 
literature,  especially  the  drama.  Every  one  knows 
-      [Z7] 

K9i  Ai\ 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

the  passage  in  which  Lessing  declares  that  the 
"  Poetics  "  is  as  infalHble  in  its  own  way  as  the  ele- 
ments of  Euclid.  Furthermore,  just  as  Luther,  in 
emancipating  Germany  from  spiritual  servitude  to 
Rome,  aimed  to  set  up  a  definite  discipline  in  place 
of  what  he  had  abolished,  and  looked  with  horror 
on  those  who  made  use  of  their  new  liberty  to  fall 
into  mere  antinomianism,  so  Lessing,  in  emancipat- 
ing Germany  from  intellectual  and  literary  servi- 
tude to  France,  proposed  to  substitute  a  true  code 
for  the  false  code  he  had  abrogated,  and  looked  with 
disgust  on  the  young  antinomians  of  the  Storm 
and  Stress,  who  were  for  getting  rid  of  all  codes 
and  setting  up  instead  an  uncharted  emotionalism. 
Finally,  just  as  Luther,  though  attacking  the  form- 
alism of  Rome,  was  himself  in  some  sort  a  form- 
alist by  his  emphasis  on  the  text  of  the  Bible,  so 
Lessing,  in  his  attack  on  neo- classic  formalism^ 
remained  more  or  less  of  a  formalist  himself  by  his 
insistence  on  an  infallible  Aristotle, 

From  one  point  of  view  Lessing  may  be  defined  .  ^ 
as  the  last  and  greatest  of  the  Aristotelian  formal- 
ists. The  underlying  unity  of  his  critical  work  — 
both  the  "  Laokoon  "  and  "  Hamburg  Dramaturgy  " 
[38] 


LESSING  AND   THE   "LAOKOON" 

—  lies  in  his  endeavor  to  distinguish  the  truly  classic 
from  the  pseudo-classical ;  and  in  practice  this  nearly 
always  means,  as  I  have  said,  to  discriminate  be- 
tween true  and  false  Aristotelianism.  He  disavows 
all  claim  to  be  systematic,  but  he  is  at  least  keenly 
logical  and  analytical.  He  has  indeed  laid  himself 
open  to  the  charge  Cardinal  Newman  brings  against 
Aristotle,  that  of  looking,  onlogic  as  the  foundadon 
of  the  fine  arts.  In  general  he  is  a  lover  of  bounda- 
ries and  distinctions,  and  of  the  clearly  defined  type, 
though  not  of  course  in  a  narrow  or  pedantic  way. 
He  even  justifies  in  one  passage  a  mixture  of  the 
genres  by  the  somewhat  unexpected  argument  that 
a  mule  is  a  very  useful  beast,  in  spite  of  the  fact 
that  it  is  neither  a  horse  nor  an  ass. 

We  should  add  that  there  is  one  whole  side  of 
Lessing  that  is  less  humanistic  and  more  humani- 
tarian, a  side  that  connects  him  with  the  great  ex- 
pansion of  knowledge  and  sympathy  just  then  begin- 
ning, and  more  specifically  with  the  influence  of  a 
Frenchman  like  Diderot.  Lowell,  however,  is  very 
misleading  when  he  describes  Diderot  as  a  "de- 
boshed  "  Lessing.  In  reality  the  difference  is  far 
more  fundamental.  In  his  whole  temper  Lessing  is 
[39  1 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

not  merely  rational  but  disciplinary ;  whereas  Dide- 
rot, perhaps  a  more  brilliant  and  certainly  a  more 
spontaneous  genius,  is  deficient  in  this  guiding  and 
controlling  judgment.  Diderot,  in  his  own  phrase, 
Jives  at  the  "  mercy  of  his  diaphragm,"  tends  to 
overstrain  all  boundaries  of  thought  and  feeling,  and 
so  prepares  the  way  for  the  Titanism  of  every  kind 
that  has  marked  our  modern  emancipation. 

Lessing,  on  the  contrary,  looks  in  his  critical 
method  backward  to  the  Renaissance,  rather  than  for- 
ward to  the  nineteenth  century.  If  we  approach  his 
critical  writings  without  preconceived  notions  or 
conventional  admiration,  we  shall  admit  that  there 
is  something  about  them  that  from  our  point  of 
view  is  foreign,  remote,  and  disconcerting.  He  usu- 
ally judges,  not  from  the  immediate  impression,  but  ^/ 
by  certain  fixed  laws  and  principles  which  he  pro- 
ceeds to  found  upon  Aristotle.  In  this  respect,  if 
we  may  be  allowed  to  digress  for  a  moment,  he  is 
really  farther  away  from  us  than  Boileau ;  for  Boi-  i 
leau,  who  under  certain  romantic  obsessions  has  come 

to  be  Innlfpr)  j^j^  pg  an  r^rrVl-f^>rmn]]<;f    waS    in  reality 

the  leader  of  a  reaction  against  formalism.  Few  con- 
trasts, indeed,  are  more  surprising  than  that  between 
[40] 


LESSING   AND   THE   "LAOKOON" 

the  real  Boileau  and  Boileau  the  romantic  bugaboo. 
Boileau  was  simply  a  wit  and  man  of  the  world,  not 
especially  logical  or  imaginative  or  profound,  but 
with  an  admirable  integrity  of  character  and  an  ex- 
traordinarily keen  and  correct  sensibility.  Literary 
works,  and  especially  epics  and  tragedies,  turned  out 
mechanically  according  to  the  neo-classic  recipes, 
had  ended  in  intolerable  boredom,  and  Boileau  for 
one  decided  he  could  stand  it  no  longer.  It  was  in 
this  spirit  that  he  assailed  and  overthrew  Chapelain, 
the  chief  of  the  Aristotelian  formalists,  whose  per- 
fectly "regular"  epic,  "La  Pucelle,"  had  no  fault 
according  to  Boileau  except  that  nobody  could  read 
it,  Boileau's  message  to  the  authors  of  his  time  was 
simple :  It  is  proper  and  indeed  necessary  for  you 
to  obey  the  rules,  but  at  best  the  rules  have  only  a 
negative  virtue :  the  really  important  matter  is  that 
you  should  interest  us.  He  added  to  his  own  precept 
his  translation  of  Longinus  "  On  the  Sublime,"  with 
its  constant  measuring  of  literature  not  according  to 
its  formal  perfection,  but  according  to  its  power 
to  stir  emotion.  As  rendered  by  Boileau,  Longinus 
takes  his  place  with  Horace  and  Aristotle  as  a 
supreme  critical  authority.  Henceforth  the  appeal 
[41] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

is  even  more  to  taste  than  to  the  rules  :  in  other 
words,  what  we  should  call  the  subjective  test  re- 
ceives increasing  emphasis,  though  we  may  surmise 
that  the  emotional  undercurrent  we  have  already 
detected  in  the  early  eighteenth  century,  and  which 
runs  in  Diderot  into  actual  Titanic  unrestraint,  is 
something  very  different  from  the  true  spirit  of 
Longinus. 

Moliere,  although  he  had  little  faith  even  in  the 
negative  virtue  of  the  rules,  was  with  Boileau  in 
other  respects.  He  wrote  the  famous  scene  between 
Vadius  and  Trissotin  in  much  the  spirit  in  which 
his  friend  assailed  Chapelain ;  but  like  most  of  the 
wits  of  the  age  of  Louis  XIV,  Moli^re  carried  the 
warfare  on  pedantry  to  a  point  where  it  became  a 
menace  to  sound  learning  and  an  encouragement  to 
polite  superficiality.  Vadius  is  laughed  at  because  he 
knows  more  Greek  than  any  man  in  France  ;  but,  as 
Dr.  Johnson  would  have  told  us,  this  is  in  itself  the 
most  respectable  of  accomplishments. 

Now  Lessing  repudiated  what  was  artificiaJL-and 
superficial  in  the  Frenchtradition,  —  its  conven- 
tions, and  etiquette,  and  gallantries,  — but  at  the  risk 
of  losing  a  real  virtue,  viz.,  the  exquisite  urbanity  that 
[42] 


LESSING  AND   THE   "LAOKOON" 

the  French  at  their  best  had  really  succeeded  in  at- 
taining. The  ancients,  says  Lessing,  knew  nothing 
about  politeness ;  whereupon,  reverting  to  the  tone 
of  the  Renaissance  polemic,  he  proceeds  to  belabor 
the  unhappy  Klotz.  Thus  it  has  come  about  that  in 
their  exchanges  of  amenities  German  scholars  even 
at  the  present  day  often  make  us  think  of  Vadius  and 
Trissotin.  In  short,  Germany  failed  to  get  the  full 
benefit  of  the  great  French  reaction  against  pedan- 
try, and  still  suffers  from  this  failure.  Lessing, 
indeed,  is  constantly  reminding  us  of  the  type  of 
scholar  that  flourished  before  the  school  of  taste  and 
urbanity,  the  type  that  we  may  define  as  the  Levi- 
athan of  learning.  Two  other  great  figures  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  Dr.  Johnson  and  Bayle,  also 
seem  in  some  respects  survivors  of  this  earlier  period. 
The  antipathy  Lessing  felt  for  the  French  wit  and 
courtier  was  not  unlike  that  of  Johnson  for  Ches- 
terfield. 

Lessing  has  little  of  the  Longinian  temper,  and 

not  enough  of  the  new  sensibility  of  the  eighteenth 

century  to  be  dominated  by  it.  What  we  find  in  the 

^"  Laokoon  "  is  not  primarily  an  apgeal^tojaste  and 

feeling,  bjat  a  mixture  of  Aristotelian  _theory_and 

[  43  ]  ^"^ 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

precise  linguistic  and  antiquarian  research.  That  is 
why  a  course  of  readingTn  the  Renaissance  critics 
is  so  immensely  helpful  in  understanding  him.  Like 
virtually  all  these  critics,  except  Patrizzi,  he  insists 
that  art,  including  poetry,  is  an  imitation.  Like  the 
most  orthodox  of  them,  he  regards  it  not  only  as  an 
imitation  but  as  an  imitation  of  human  action.  To 
action  in  the  sense  of  plot  or  general  purpose  he 
would  subordinate  all  other  elements  in  poetry,  such 
as  character,  sentiments,  diction,  etc.,  just  as  in 
painting  he  would  subordinate  all  other  elements  — 
light,  color,  expression,  etc.  —  to  design.  Some  of 
the  consequences  of  this  Aristotelian  orthodoxy 
make  him  seem  to  us,  as  I  have  already  said,  re- 
mote and  foreign. 

In  one  of  his  poems  Matthew  Arnold  relates  how 
in  the  course  of  a  walk  with  a  friend  in  Hyde  Park 
they  fell  to  talking  of  "  Lessing's  famed  Laocoon," 
the  doctrine  of  which  Arnold  sums  up  in  part  as 
follows  :  — 

"Behold,"  I  said,  "the  painter's  sphere! 
The  limits  of  his  art  appear. 
The  passing  group,  the  summer-morn, 
The  grass,  the  elms,  that  blossom'd  thorn  — 

[44] 


LESSING   AND   THE   "LAOKOON" 

Those  cattle  couch'd,  or,  as  they  rise, 
Their  shining  flanks,  their  liquid  eyes  — 
These,  or  much  greater  things,  but  caught 
Like  these,  and  in  one  aspect  brought ! 
In  outward  semblance  he  must  give 
A  moment's  life  of  things  that  live  ; 
Then  let  him  choose  his  moment  well, 
With  power  divine  its  story  tell."  ' 

The  last  two  lines  are  admirable,  but  Arnold  can 


1 


scarcely  be  said  to  be  happy  in  his  choice  of  illustra-    -a^  7 


-o-r 


tions.  What  are  cows  and  elms  and  grass  to  one 
like  Lessing,  who  is  interested  only  in  the  painting 
of  human  action,  and  not  of  ordinary  human  action 
at  that,  but  of  ideal  action  in  the  Aristotelian  sense 
of  the  word  ideal,  that  is,  action  from  which  all  ir- 
relevant details  are  eliminated  and  in  which  every- 
thing is  linked  together  "according  to  probability 
or  necessity,"  and  subordinated  to  some  dramatic 
aim  ?  He  is  impatient  of  everything  that  does 
not  help  forward  this  higher  unity  and  converge 
toward  the  total  effect.  No  one  ever  interpreted 
more  strenuously  Aristotle's  great  sentence  :  "The 
end  is  the  chief  thing  of  all."  It  is  the  goal  of 
art  that   interests  him  rather   than   any  pleasant 

*  Epilogue  to  Lessing's  Laocoon. 

[45] 


%_ 


A 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

vagabondage  of  fancy  or  sensibility  on  the  way 
thither.  He  will  have  no  expression  for  the  mere 
sake  of  expression,  no  color  for  the  pure  delight  of 
color.  If  the  path  is  beautiful,  says  Anatole  France, 
let  us  not  ask  where  it  is  leading  us.  Lessing  would 
not  have  even  understood  such  a  use  of  the  word 
beautiful.  In  one  passage  he  raises  the  question 
whether  it  would  not  have  been  better  if  painting  in 
oil  had  never  been  invented,  because  of  the  tendency 
of  color  to  scatter  and  distract  the  painter  and  keep 
him  from  concentrating  on  the  end.'  Elsewhere  he 
says  that  "  mere  coloring  and  transitory  expression 
have  no  ideal  because  Nature  has  proposed  to  her- 
self nothing  definite  in  them."  ^  "  Mere  coloring  and 
transitory  expression  "  have  of  course  become  for 
many  of  our  modern  schools  of  poetry  and  painting 
the  whole  of  beauty ;  but  for  Lessing.  as  for  the 
classicist  in  general,  beauty  does  not  consist  pri- 
marily in  expression,  but  in  a.  certain  informing 
symmetry  and  proportion  that,  Jike  true  plot^jiL 
tragedy,  points  the  way  to  some  human  end.  How 
far  Lessing  is,  not  only  from  our  modern  use  of  the 

'  Laokoon,  edL  Bliimner,  469  (Nachlass  D). 
'  Ibid.,  399  (Nachlass  A). 

[46] 


I 


LESSING   AND   THE   "  LAOKOON  " 

word  beauty,  but  also  from  our  use  of  the  word  ideal, 
will  appear  from  another  passage, 

"The  highest  bodily  beauty,"  says  Lessing,  "ex; 
ists  only  in  man^and  even  in  him  only  by  virtue 
of  the  ideal. 

"  This  ideal  already  finds  less  scope  in  the  beasts, 
and  in  the  world  of  plants  and  inanimate  objects  has 
no  place  at  all. 

"  We  can  infer  from  this  the  rank  of  the  flower 
and  landscape  painter.  He  imitates  beauties  that  are 
capable  of  no  ideal.  He  works  therefore  simply  with 
his  eye  and  hand  ;  and  genius  has  little  or  no  share 
in  what  he  does."  ' 

Lessing  goes  on  to  say  that  even  so  he  prefers 
the  landscape  painter  to  the  historical  painter  who 
does  not  direct  his  main  purpose  toward  beauty 
but  is  willing  to  display  his  rlf-yprnpss  \r\  mere  ex- 
pression wjthout  subordinating  this  expressionJLa 
beauiy 

Such  a  view  of  the  ideal  and  of  beauty  would 
evidently  not  allow  a  high  rank  to  the  imitators 
of  Thomson's  "  Seasons,"  even  if  they  had  been 
successful  in  painting  their  poetical  landscapes ;  and 

*  Bliimner,  440  (Nachlaiss  C). 
[47] 


THE  NEW   LAOKOON 

Lessing  would  not  admit  that  they  had.  He  is  as 
willing  as  any  critic  of  the  Renaissance  to  grant  that 
poetry  is  a  painting  and  an  imitation,  but  this  is  as 
far  as  he  is  willing  to  carry  ut  pictura  poesis.  He 
is  not  willing  to  take  the  next  step,  and  establish  a 
formal  resemblance  between  words  and  figures  of 
speech  in  poetry  and  colors  in  painting.  In  fact, 
Lessing  has  done  little  more  than  develop  the  lines 
of  La  Fontaine :  — 

Les  mots  et  les  couleurs  ne  sont  choses  pareilles 
Ni  les  yeux  ne  sont  les  oreilles. 

There  had  grown  up  during  the  neo-classic  period 
a  formal  confusion  of  poetry  and  painting ;  Lessing 
proposes  to  show  thaj>3iey  are  formally  distinct. 
In  his  own  words^  — 

"  Both  ai^  arts  of  imitation  and  have  all  the  rules 
in  common  which  follow  from  the  conception  of  imi- 
tation. Only  they  use  quite  different  means  for  their 
imitation,  and  from  this  difference  the  special  rules 
for  each  art  take  their  rise."  ' 

He  has  indeed  struck  the  keynote  of  his  book  on 
the  very  title-page,  in  the  motto  from  Plutarch: 
"  They  [i.  e.,  painting  and  poetry]  differ  both  in  the 

'  Bliimner,  353,  354  (Nachlass  A). 
[48] 


LESSING  AND   THE   "LAOKOON" 

material  and  modes  of  their  imitation."  Now  the 
material  with  which  the  poet  works  is  words,  and 
words  necessarily  follow  one  another  in  time ;  any- 
one who  would  paint  directly  with  words  some  vis- 
ible object  is  forced  to  enumerate  one  after  the  other 
the  different  parts  of  it,  and  a  blurred  and  confused 
image  must  necessarily  result  from  this  piecemeal 
enumeration  of  details,  from  this  attempt  to  render 
the  coexistent  by  means  of  the  successive.  What_ 
the  poet_caiij;eally_^mt^_is^  actions,  and  in  render- 
ing anything  .that. J5_  not  action  he  should  strive  to._ 
\  j  translate  it  into  terms  of  action.  Thus  Homer  doe^ 
not  try  to  paint  directly  the  beauty  of  Helen,  but 
puts  the  beauty  of  Helen  in  action,  and  shows  its 
effect  upon  the  old  men  on  the  wall  at  Troy.  In  1  [ 
contrast  to  Homer,  Ariosto  devotes  whole  stanzas 
to  describing  feature  by  feature  the  charms  of 
Alcina,  but  all  these  descriptive  details  do  not 
coalesce  for  us  into  the  distinct  image  of  a  living 
woman ;  and  the  lines  in  this  description  that  are 
most  successful  are  the  ones  that  contain  an  element 
of  action.     ■ 

All  the  details  with  which  the  poet  can  deal  only 
disconnectedly,  the  painter  can  render  as  they  acta- 
[49] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

ally  coexist  in  space.  The  painter's  limitation  ap- 
pears when  he  tries  to  paint  action  ;  his  art  has  at 
its  command  but  a  single  moment ;  if  he  attempts 
to  paint  two  moments  of  an  action,  he  is  guilty  ol 
bad  painting ;  if  again  he  tries  to  tell  a  story  or  in- 
dulge in  literary  intentions  through  the  use  of  alle- 
gory, he  falls  into  an  obscurity  that  corresponds  to 
the  blurred  and  confused  image  of  the  poetical 
word-painter.  Thg__mQin£nt,  then,  is_all:im^Qrtant 
for  the  plasticartist ;  as  Lessing  puts  it,  he  must 
select  "the  most  pregnant  moment," — the  one  that 
throws  the  most  light  on  the  past  stages  of  the  ac- 
tion and  points  the  way  most  clearly  to  what  is  still 
to  come.  At  this  point  Lessing  seems  to  relax  the 
objective  rigor  of  his  method  and  to  consider  paint- 
ing not  merely  in  its  outer  means  of  realization,  but 
in  its  effects  upon  the  imagination. 

"  The  only  fruitful  moment  is  th^onejhat  allows 
the  imagination_frec_scope>  The  longer  we  gaze,  the 
more  must  our  imagination  add ;  and  the  more  our 
imagination  adds,  the  more  we  must  believe  we  see. 
In  the  whole  course  of  an  emotion  there  is  no  mo- 
ment which  possesses  this  advantage  so  little  as  its 
highest  stage.  There  is  nothing  beyond  this  ;  and 
[50] 


LESSING  AND   THE   "LAOKOON" 

the  presentation  of  extremes  to  the  eye  clips  the 
wings  of  Fancy,  prevents  her  from  soaring  beyond 
the  impressions  of  the  senses,  and  compels  her  to 
occupy  herself  with  weaker  images,"  etc' 

In  other  words,  the  painter  is  confined  by  the 
limits  of  his  art  to  one  moment  of  an  action,  but 
can  suggest  other  moments ;  and  his  ambition  should 
be  to  select  the  moment  that  has  the  most  of  this 
suggestiveness.  Though  objectively  limited  to  im- 
ages, he  can  set  the  spectator  to  dreaming  of  motion 
and  action. 

Lessing  can  scarcely  be  said  to  have  developed 
adequately  the  converse  doctrine  that,  though  the 
poet  is  objectively  limited  to  the  painting  of  motion 
and  action,  he  can  act  suggestively  upon  the  reader 
and  set  him  to  dreaming  of  images.^  Lessing  is  so  hu- 
manisticjjiat  even  in  the  sort  of  waking  dream  that 
is  the  illusion  of  true  art,  he  would  have  us  dream 
of  action.  Perhaps,  indeed,  it  is  misleading  to  apply 
to  Lessing  at  all  such  words  as  dreaming  and  sug- 
gestiveness. He  does  not  for  example  concern  him- 

'  Blumner,  165  (III). 

*  The  clearest  allusion  to  this  dreaming  of  images  in  the  Zap- 
koon  is  in  xiv  and  the  note  at  the  very  end  (Blumner,  247,  248). 

[51] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

self  sufficiently,  to  our  modern  thinking,  with  the 
suggestiveness  of  words.  He  looks  on  them  too 
much  as  a  sort  of  passive  material,  and  on  the  poet 
as  too  conscious  and  deliberate  in  his  combining  of 
them.  We  are  more  inclined  to  dwell  on  the  mys- 
tery and  magic  that  words  may  acquire  at  the 
touch  of  a  true  poet ;  on  the  almost  hypnotic  spell 
they  may  be  made  to  cast  over  our  feelings  :  — 

All  the  charm  of  all  the  Muses  often  flowering  in  a  lonely 
word. 

In  thus  tending  to  dissociate  language  from  emo- 
1  tion,  to  allow  insufficiently  for  the  unconscious  and 
!  the  spontaneous,  in  short,  to  treat  art  too  analyti-/ 
cally,  Lessing  has  points  of  contact  with  the  very 
school  he  assailed.    His  ambition  was  simply  to  op- 
pose a  true  analysis  to  the  false  analysis  of  the 
pseudo-classic  critics.  The  main  result  of  this  analy- 
'   sis  —  the  great  central  generalization  of  the  "  Lao- 
jfi  koon,"  that  poetry  deals  with  temporal,  painting 
with  spatial  relations,  poetry  with  the  successive 
and  painting  with  the  coexistent  —  will  not,  as  I 
have  already  said,  seem  extremely  original  to  one 
who  is  familiar  with  the  previous  literature  of  the 
subject.  In  his  introduction  Bliimner  gives  a  list  of 
[52] 


I 


'4 


LESSING   AND   THE   "LAOKOON" 

the  writers  who  furnished  hints  to  Lessing,  and  in 
some  cases  partly  anticipated  him.  Long  as  this 
Hst  is,  it  is  not,  as  I  can  testify  from  my  own  read- 
ing, complete.  For  example,  Blumner  says  nothing 
of  a  passage  from  Caylus  in  which  the  Count  comes 
very  near  to  making  Lessing's  main  distinction.' 
This  distinction,  indeed,  forced  itself  even  on  some 
of  those  who  were  trying  hardest  to  confuse  the 
arts  according  to  the  pseudo-classic  formula.  I  find 
a  remarkable  example  of  this  fact  in  a  writer  whom 
Blumner  has  also  failed  to  mention,  Father  CasteL 
As  is  well  known,  the  "  Laokoon  "  in  its  present 
form  is  only  a  fragment,  —  one  of  three  parts  Les- 
sing had  planned  to  write.  In  the  third  part  he 
had  intended  to  discuss  the  arts  of  music  and  danc- 
ing. We  can  only  infer  his  ideas  on  these  arts  from 
his  few  scattered  memoranda  for  this  uncompleted 
portion  of  his  work ;  but  in  his  treatment  of  music, 
as  in  that  of  poetry  and  painting,  he  would  evi- 
dently have  been  chiefly  interested  in  establishing 
boundaries  and  frontiers.  We  may  judge  from  his 
reference  to  the  Kapellmeister  Telemann  that  he 
was  no  friend  of  musical  painting,  that  he  would 

'  This  passage  is  quoted  in  Rocheblave,  op.  cit.,  pp.  218  f. 
[53] 


THE  NEW   LAOKOON 

have  condemned  any  mixing  up  of  the  domain  of 
sound  with  that  of  color  and  vision. 

Now  no  one  was  more  celebrated  in  the  eigh- 
teenth century  for  confusions  of  this  kind  than  Father 
Castel.  One  finds  constant  allusion  in  the  literature 
of  the  period  to  his  clavecin  des  couleurs  or  clavecin 
octilaire,  —  in  other  words,  a  sort  of  instrument  he 
had  constructed  to  make  sound  visible  and  inter- 
pret it  in  terms  of  color.  Father  Castel  set  forth 
the  theory  of  his  color-clavichord  in  the  "  Mercure  " 
of  November,  1725,  He  completed  the  first  model 
of  the  new  instrument,  as  he  tells  us,  on  December 
21,  1734.  He  says  that  he  had  been  put  on  the 
track  of  his  discovery  by  something  he  had  read 
in  the  "Musurgia"  of  Kircher.'  "  If  at  the  time  of 
a  fine  concert,"  writes  Kircher,  "  we  could  see  the  air 
stirred  by  all  the  vibrations  communicated  to  it  by 
the  voices  and  instruments,  we  should  be  surprised 
to  see  it  filled  with  the  liveliest  and  most  finely 
blended  colors."  ^  It  was  Castel's  ambition  to  make 

'  Athanasius  Kircher  (1602-80)  was  a  German  Jesuit.  His 
Musurgia  universalis,  sive  ars  magna  consent  et  dissoni  appeared 
in  1650. 

*  See  Esprit,  Saillies  et  singularity  du  P.  Castel  {1762),  p-  280. 
Castel  was  born  in  16S8  and  died  in  1757. 

[54] 


LESSING  AND  THE  "LAOKOON" 

these  analogical  colors  visible ;  to  arrange  a  series  of 
colors  in  the  same  harmonic  proportions  as  sounds  ; 
to  connect  them  with  a  key-board  in  such  wise  that, 
when  the  fingers  touched  certain  keys,  the  colors 
should  appear  ordered  and  combined  in  the  same  way 
as  the  sounds  of  the  musical  notes  corresponding  to 
these  keys.  But  what  colors  are  equivalent  to  what 
notes?  "The  green,"  answers  Father  Castel,  "cor- 
responds to  re,  and  will  doubtless  make  them  [the 
audience]  feel  that  this  note  re  is  natural,  rural, 
sprightly,  pastoral.  Red,  which  corresponds  to  sol^ 
will  give  them  the  idea  of  a  warlike  note,  bloody, 
angry,  terrible.  Blue,  corresponding  to  do,  will  give 
them  the  impression  of  a  note  that  is  noble,  majes- 
tic, celestial,  divine,  etc'  The  deaf  in  this  way  will 
be  able  to  see  the  music  of  the  ears,  the  blind  to 
hear  the  music  of  the  eyes,  and  those  who  have  eyes 
as  well  as  ears  will  enjoy  each  kind  of  music  better 
by  enjoying  both."* 

'  Father  Castel  may  have  had  a  touch  of  color-audition  to 
help  on  his  pseudo-classic  theorizing.  Cf.  the  sonnet  of  Arthur 
Rimbaud  I  refer  to  later  (p.  183). 

*  Op.  cit.,  p.  329.  Father  Castel  is  probably  indebted  for  his 
theories,  not  only  to  Kircher,  but  to  Newton  (see  Optics,  Book  I, 
Pt.  II,  Propositions  3  and  6).    A  discussion  of  the  whole  subject 

[55] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

But  Father  Castel  is  not  satisfied  with  colors 
merely  arranged  in  a  diatonic  series,  and  appearing 
and  disappearing  rapidly  at  the  touch  of  a  key-board 
in  imitation  of  musical  notes.  He  would  like  to  give 
more  permanency  to  his  color  concerts,  to  arrive,  as 
he  says,  at  a  still  easier  means  of  "painting  music 
and  sounds,"  and  he  proceeds  to  work  out  a  scheme 
for  what  he  calls  "  musical  and  harmonic  tapestries." 
"  Can  you  imagine,"  he  asks,  "  what  a  room  will 
be,  the  walls  of  which  are  hung  with  rigadoons  and 
minuets,  with  sarabands  and  passacaglias,  v/ith  can- 
tatas and  sonatas,  and  even,  if  you  please,  with  a 
very  complete  representation  of  all  the  music  of  an 
opera  .? "  '  When  painting  has  thus  succeeded  in  re- 
producing analogically  all  the  harmonic  effects  of 
music,  there  will  be  more  reason  than  heretofore, 
says  Castel,  giving  a  slight  twist  to  Simonides,  for 
calling  it  a  dumb  music  ;  **  but  a  music  all  the  more 

will  be  found  in  Erasmus  Darwin's  Loves  of  the  Plants  (Interlude 
to  Canto  II).  Darwin  considers  the  possibility  of  improving  on 
Castel,  and  concludes  that  "if  visible  music  can  be  agreeably  pro- 
duced, it  would  be  more  easy  to  add  sentiment  to  it  by  the  repre- 
sentations of  groves  and  Cupids  and  sleeping  nymphs  amid  the 
changing  colors,  than  is  commonly  done  by  the  words  of  audible 
music." 

'   Op.  cit.,  p.  309. 

[56] 


I 


LESSING  AND  THE   "LAOKOON" 

effective,"  he  adds,  "in  that  it  will  steal  its  way  into 
the  heart  with  less  noise  and  tumult  "  '  Father  Castel 
would  evidently  have  agreed  with  Keats,  that  "heard 
melodies  are  sweet,  but  those  unheard  are  sweeter." 
Not  content  with  confusing  sound  and  color  Father 
Castel  meditated  still  other  confusions.  Thus  he 
gives  a  recipe  for  constructing  a  clavecin  des  odeurs : 
by  striking  a  key-board  one  could  open  and  shut  the 
vents  of  a  row  of  scent-boxes  arranged  in  a  sort  of 
diatonic  series,  and  so  play  concerts  of  perfumes.^ 
The  ideas  of  Castel,  indeed,  are  the  re  duetto  ad  ab- 
surdwn  of  certain  pseudo-classical  tendencies :  for  it 
will  be  observed  that  he  does  not  confuse  the  arts 
subjectively,  but  objectively  and  formally  in  their 
means  of  realization  ;  and  in  attempting  this  outer 
and  formal  confusion  he  was  led  curiously  enough  to 
anticipate  Lessing.  "  One  difference  between  color 
and  sound,"  he  says,  "had  kept  him  in  a  state  of 
uncertainty  for  the  past  twelve  or  thirteen  years  as 
to  the  completeness  of  the  analogy,"  which  he  had 
been  trying  all  that  time  to  establish  between  them  : 
colors  were  fixed  in  space  and  sounds  were  fugitive  in 
time ;  and  on  several  occasions  he  states  the  difficulty 

'  op.  cit.,  p.  313.  '  Ibid.,  p.  369. 

[57] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

almost  as  forcibly  as  Lessing.^  But  though  this  doubt 
as  to  the  truth  of  his  analogy  tormented  Father 
Castel,  it  did  not  deter  him  from  riding  his  hobbies 
and  making  of  himself  a  target  for  the  mockeries 
of  Voltaire. 

Father  Castel  is  the  kind  of  figure  that  usually 
appears  toward  the  very  end  of  a  literary  movement. 
His  color-clavichord  is  as  symptomatic  in  this  re- 
spect as  the  mouth-organ  of  Des  Esseintes  that  we 
shall  discuss  in  a  later  chapter.  Only  Castel  marks 
the  supreme  exaggerations  of  the  pseudo-classic,  Des 
Esseintes  of  the  romantic  point  of  view.  With  this 
mention  of  Castel  we  may  therefore  terminate  appro- 
priately our  very  incomplete  survey  of  the  pseudo- 
classical  confusion  of  the  arts.^ 

'  Cf.  Ibid.,  p.  294  :  "  Les  couleurs  suivent  I'etendue  des  lieux ;  les 
lieux  sont  fixes  et  permanents;  mais  les  sons  suivent  I'etendue  des 
temps  ;  or  les  temps  sont  essentiellement  successifs  et  inalliables." 

'^  If  I  were  attempting  a  complete  survey,  I  should  need  to 
take  a  glance  at  certain  aspects  of  the  baroque  and  rococo  styles, 
etc.  A  wider  survey  of  this  kind  would  furnish  fresh  illustrations 
of  the  pseudo-classic  tendency  to  confuse  the  arts  formally  and 
objectively  (usually  in  terms  of  painting).  The  man  who  did  more 
than  any  one  else  to  confound  the  standards  of  painting  with 
those  of  sculpture  and  architecture  was  of  course  Bernini.  Lessing 
reacted  so  far  in  the  opposite  direction  that  he  has  been  justly 
accused  of  carrying  the  standards  of  sculpture  into  painting. 


PART  II 

THE    ROMANTIC    CONFUSION    OF 
THE  ARTS 


CHAPTER   IV 
THE  THEORY  OF  SPONTANEITY 

We  have  seen  the  role  that  was  played  during  the 
neo-classical  period  by  Horace's  comparison  between 
poetry  and  painting,  or  the  equivalent  one  of  Simon- 
ides.  The  saying  that  really  bears  the  same  relation 
to  the  modern  period  that  the  Horatian  simile  does 
to  the  neo-classical  —  though  it  has  had  less  actual 
!^-  vogue  —  is  that  of  Friedrich  Schlegel :  Architecture 
is  frozen  music'  Ut  pictura poesis  had  been  taken 
by  the  neo-classicists  to  mean  that  the  common 
bond  ^  of  the  arts  of  which  Cicero  speaks  is  purely 
formal.  Friedrich  Schlegel,  on  the  other  hand,  repre- 
senting the  romanticists,  would  seek  for  ikixscom^nune 

*  The  authorship  of  this  phrase  does  not  seem  quite  certain. 
The  chief  claimants  to  it  besides  F.  Schlegel  are  SchelUng  and 
Gorres.  See  Biichmann's  Gefliigelte  Worte  (23  Aufl.,  1907),  pp. 
356,  357-  The  idea  of  the  phrase  is  of  course  contained  in  the 
passage  I  quote  later  (p.  124)  from  A.  W^.  Schlegel, 

^  "  Omnes  artes  quas  ad  humanitatem  pertinent,  habent  quod- 
dam  commune  vinculum,  et  quasi  cognatione  quadam  inter  se  con- 
tinentur."  Pro  Archia  Poeta.  This  passage  is  taken  by  Spence 
as  motto  for  his  Polymetis. 

[61] 


^,  THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

^^  /  viftctihiin  not  in  form,  but  in  feeling :  even  archi- 
tecture, apparently  the  most  formal  of  the  arts, 
arose  originally  in  response  to  a  rhythmic  thrill ;  is, 
in  short,  only  congealed  emotion.  Long  before  Wal- 
ter Pater,  the  Germans  declared  that  music  is  the 
most  artistic  of  the  arts  because  it  is  the  least  for- 
mal ;  that  the  other  arts  tend  toward  their  perfection 
in  proportion  as  they  approximate  to  music. 

Now,  just  as  we  have  found  that  all  the  neo-classic 
comparing  and  confusing  of  poetry  and  painting  is 
only  a  corollary  of  something  still  more  fundamental, 
namely,  the  doctrine  of  imitation,  so  the  exaltation 
of  music  is  only  a  corollary  of  something  still  more 
fundamental  in  romanticism,  namely,  the  theory 
of  spontaneity.  By  making  the  arts  purely  imi- 
tative the  neo-classicist  had  reduced  the  role  of 
the  spontaneous,  the  unexpected,  the  original.  He 
aimed  to  bring  everything  so  far  as  possible  under 
the  control  of  the  cold  and  deliberate  understanding, 
to  the  neglect  of  all  that  is  either  above  or  below  a 
certain  rational  level,  —  the  sense  of  awe  and  mys- 
tery as  well  as  the  sense  of  wonder.  He  would  have 
everything  logical,  conventionally  correct,  dryly  di- 
dactic, able  to  give  a  clear  account  of  itself  when 
[62] 


THE  THEORY   OF   SPONTANEITY 

tested  by  the  standards  of  common  sense  and  or- 
dinary fact.  By  his  unwillingness  to  allow  for  the 
unconscious  and  the  unpremeditated,  he  tended 
to  identify  art  with  the  artificial,  and  to  turn  the  di- 
vine illusion  of  poetry  into  a  sort  of  elegant  falsehood. 
This  is,  of  course,  an  extreme  statement  of  the 
neo-classic  point  of  view.  Not  even  a  Chapelain  or 
a  Rymer  or  a  Gottsched  would  realize  it  in  every 
particular.  Then,  too,  we  should  not  forget  the  influ- 
ences that,  during  the  neo-classical  period  itself, 
were  making  against  a  pure  formalism :  for  ex- 
ample, Boileau  and  his  rendering  of  Longinus,  and 
the  growing  emphasis  from  this  time  forth  on  the 
personal  and  emotional  factor,  —  the  rise,  in  short, 
of  a  school  of  taste.  A  closely  allied  influence  was 
that  of  women  and  the  drawing-rooms,  and  their 
recognition,  if  not  of  the  spontaneous,  at  least  of 
the  undefinable  element  in  artistic  creation,  of  the 
je  ne  sais  qiioi,  as  they  were  fond  of  calling  it.  We 
must  also  remember  that  the  tendency  to  submit 
everything  to  the  hard  and  dry  light  of  the  under- 
standing is  by  no  means  a  purely  neo-classic  phe- 
nomenon. There  were  various  other  contributing 
causes  to  the  so-called  period  of  enhghtenment 
[63] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

{Aufkldning)  :  for  example,  the  philosophy  of  Des- 
cartes and  the  developments  it  received  in  Germany 
in  the  systems  of  Leibnitz  and  Christian  Wolf. 

Whatever  the  explanation,  few  will  deny  that  the 
early  eighteenth  century  had  arrived  at  an  over- 
analytical  dryness  of  mind,  and  so  combined  it  with 
social  convention  as  to  repress  a  number  of  very 
natural  human  instincts.  According  to  some  mod- 
ern psychologists,  when  an  essential  side  of  human 
nature  is  thus  denied  and  starved,  it  is  not  elimi- 
nated entirely,  but  merely  forced  into  the  subcon- 
scious ;  and  when  it  has  there  accumulated  for  a 
certain  time,  it  makes  its  way  back  to  the  surface 
in  a  sort  of  "  subliminal  uprush."  In  an  epoch  of 
convention  and  dry  rationality  there  finally  arises,  in 
the  words  of  Matthew  Arnold,  the  need  of  "  storms, 
passion,  effusion,  and  relief."  We  can  follow  the 
gradual  accumulation  of  such  emotional  elements 
beneath  the  surface  of  the  eighteenth  century  as 
well  as  the  subliminal  uprush  or  overflow  of  emotion 
at  the  end,  —  an  overflow  that  assumed  forms  as 
different  as  the  German  Storm  and  Stress,  the 
Wesleyan  movement  in  England,  and  the  French 
Revolution. 

[64] 


THE  THEORY   OF   SPONTANEITY 

We  inevitably  think  of  Rousseau  as  the  most  im- 
portant single  figure  in  this  emotional  reaction,  as 
the  great  apostle  of  the  original  and  the  spontaneous. 
That  such  a  reaction  would  have  taken  place  with- 
out Rousseau  is  certain ;  but  it  is  equally  certain 
that  he  first  gave  powerful  expression  to  it  and  pro- 
foundly influenced  the  forms  that  it  assumed.  "The  " 
root  of  the  whole  Storm  and  Stress  movement  in 
Germany,"  says  Hettner,  "is  Rousseau's  gospel  of  / 
Nature."  A.  W.  Schlegel  and  Madame  de  Stael  do 
little  more  than  repeat  Rousseau  in  their  onslaughts 
on  the  imitative  and  conventional.'  Wordsworth  has 
given  merely  one  special  application  to  Rousseau's 
message,  in  his  dictum  that  poetry  is  the  spontane- 
ous overflow  of  powerful  feelings.  Schelling attacks 
systematically  the  whole  theory  of  imitation  ^  as  we 
have  outlined  it  in  the  first  part  of  this  book ;  and 
this  was  very  fitting  in  a  philosopher  who,  accord- 
ing to  a  German  authority,  set  out  to  romanticize 

*  Cf.,  for  example,  the  Nouvelle  Helo'ise,  2°  partie,  lettres  xiv- 
xvii,  with  De  rAIlemagne,  V  partie,  and  with  A.  W.  Schlegel's 
Dramatic  Art  and  Literature,  passim. 

*  Schelling  opposed  the  idea  of  creative  spontaneity  to  that 
of  mechanical  imitation  in  his  Uber  das  Verhdltniss  der  bilden- 
den  Kihiste  ziir  Natur  (1S07),  an  address  that  was  influential  on 
Coleridge. 

[65] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

the  whole  universe  ;  but  Rousseau  had  romanticized 
the  universe  before  him. 

Neo-classicism  as  it  developed  in  France  might 
be  defined  as  a  mixture  of  Aristotle  and  the  dancing- 
master,  —  Aristotle  being  more  in  evidence  at  the 
beginning  of  the  movement  and  the  dancing-master 
at  the  end.  At  first  sight  Rousseau  seems  to  have 
a  quarrel  with  the  dancing-master  rather  than  with 
Aristotle,  to  be  more  concerned  with  getting  rid  of 
social  than  of  literary  conventions.  To  the  tyranny 
of  etiquette  and  the  artificiality  of  the  drawing- 
rooms  he  opposes  a  world  of  freshness,  naturalness, 
spontaneity.  "I  was  so  tired,"  he  writes,  "of  fine 
rooms,  fountains,  artificial  groves  and  flower  beds, 
and  the  still  more  tiresome  people  who  displayed 
all  these ;  I  was  so  worn  out  with  pamphlets,  card- 
playing,  music,  silly  jokes,  insipid  mincing  airs,  great 
suppers,  that  whenever  I  spied  a  poor  hawthorn 
copse,  a  hedge,  a  farmstead,  a  meadow,  or  in  pass- 
ing through  a  hamlet  snuffed  the  odor  of  a  good 
chervil  omelette,  or  heard  from  a  distance  the  rude 
refrain  of  the  shepherd's  songs,  I  used  to  wish  at 
the  devil  the  whole  tale  of  rouge  and  furbelows."  * 

'  Con/esstoMs,\\\re.  ix(i756). 

[66] 


I 


THE   THEORY   OF   SPONTANEITY 

This  first  appearance  is,  however,  somewhat  mis- 
leading. Rousseau's  deeper  quarrel  is,  after  all,  not 
with  the  dancing-master,  but  with  Aristotle,  espe- 
cially if  Aristotle  be  taken  to  typify  not  merely  the 
tyranny  of  classical  imitation,  but  in  general  the 
logical  and  analytical  attitude  toward  life.  Man,  says 
Rousseau,  should  not  reason  or  analyze  but  feel 
(sentio  ergo  sum).  The  activity  of  the  intellect,  in- 
deed, so  far  from  being  a  gain,  is  a  source  of  degen- 
eracy. The  intellect  has  divided  man  against  him- 
self, destroyed  the  unity  of  instinct,  the  freshness 
and  spontaneity  that  primitive  man  enjoyed  and 
that  the  child  continues  to  enjoy.  Rousseau  is  an 
obscurantist  of  a  new  species.  He  sees  in  man's 
eating  of  the  fruit  of  the  tree  of  knowledge  the 
cause  of  his  fall  from  Nature,  much  as  the  theolo- 
gian sees  in  the  same  event  the  cause  of  his  fall 
from  God.  With  him  begins  that  revulsion  from 
the  rational,  the  attack  on  the  analytical  understand- 
ing, on  the  "  false  secondary  power  by  which  we 
multiply  distinctions,"  which  pervades  the  whole  ro- 
mantic movement.  If  we  would  find  our  way  back 
to  the  Arcadia  of  fresh  and  spontaneous  feeling,  we 
should  cease  to  think.  "  The  man  who  thinks,"  says 
[67] '     --::^: 


'^•^ttJiu^''" 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

Rousseau,  "  is  a  depraved  animal  "  ;  a  saying  parallel 
in  its  way  to  that  of  Gregory :  "  Ignorance  is  the 
mother  of  devotion." 

We  are  especially  urged  by  Rousseau  in  dealing 
with  art  and  literature  to  get  rid  of  our  "  med- 
dling intellects."  Like  Sterne,  he  is  for  the  man 
who  is  "pleased  he  knows  not  why  and  cares  not 
wherefore."  "The  Frenchman,"  Rousseau  com- 
plains, "  does  not  seek  on  the  stage  naturalness  and 
illusion,  but  only  wit  and  thoughts;  he  does  not 
ask  to  be  enchanted  by  a  play."  '  II  Jic  sc  sonde  pas 
d'etre  sdduit,  — the  whole  of  the  modern  programme 
is  implied  in  that  brief  phrase.  The  seductiveness  of 
artistic  creation,  or,  as  we  should  say  nowadays,  its 
power  of  suggestion,  was  Rousseau's  sole  concern. 
If  art  can  enthrall  him,  he  is  willing  to  waive  all 
question  of  logic  or  rationality.  His  first  question 
about  anything  was  not  whether  it  was  "  probable," 
or  rather  he  gave  to  the  word  an  entirely  different 
meaning.  "  When  my  imagination  has  once  caught 
fire  at  an  object,"  he  says,  "the  wildest  and  most 
childish  schemes  I  devise  in  order  to  attain  it  seem 
probable  to  me."  In  short,  the  only  logic  he  asks 
*  NouvelU  HHo'ise,  2«  partie,  lettre  xviL 

[68] 


THE   THEORY   OF   SPONTANEITY 

from  literature  or  from  life  itself  is  the  logic  of  dream- 
land. 

Rousseau  remarks  that  no  one's  conduct  and 
points  of  view  ever  derived  more  completely  than 
his  from  temperament  alone ;  and  he  was  conscious 
of  the  contrast  between  his  own  temperament  and 
that  of  his  contemporaries.  The  sense  of  unique- 
ness and  singularity  that  he  acquired  by  comparing 
himself  with  them  was  for  him  a  source  of  pride, 
and  at  the  same  time,  so  far  as  it  forced  him  into 
solitude,  a  source  of  suffering.  "  As  for  the  French," 
says  Goethe,  thinking  especially  of  the  French  of 
the  neo-classical  period,  "  they  will  always  be  ar- 
rested by  their  reason.  They  do  not  admit  that  the 
imagination  has  its  own  laws,  which  can  be  and 
must  be  independent  of  the  reason."  In  a  way,  the 
French  had  recognized  the  imagination,  but  only  as 
being,  in  Pascal's  words,  "a  proud  power  hostile 
to  reason."  If  neo-classical  theory  did  not  espe- 
cially favor  the  imagination,  Cartesian  theory  posi- 
tively discountenanced  it,  on  the  ground  that  by  its 
illusions  it  lured  man  away  from  reason  and  reality. 
It  was  somewhat  in  this  spirit  that  Father  Male- 
branche  made  his  famous  attack  on  the  imagination. 
[69] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

Now  Rousseau  is  like  Malebranche  in  at  least  one 
respect :  he  accepts  the  natural  opposition  between 
imagination  and  reason,  only  he  is  willing  to  forego 
reason  if  he  can  but  attain  imaginative  illusion.  "  Di- 
vine aberrations  of  the  reason,"  Rousseau  exclaims, 
"a  thousand  times  more  glorious  than  the  reason 
itself!"'  His  ambition  is  to  escape  from  reality 
into  a  world  of  dreams,  the  only  world  as  he  tells 
us  that  is  fit  for  habitation,'  Of  course  he  often 
reasons  brilliantly  in  his  effort  to  discredit  the  rea- 
son, just  as  Malebranche,  according  to  Voltaire, 
is  brilliantly  imaginative  in  his  attack  on  the  imagi- 
nation. As  a  result  of  Rousseau's  readiness  to  exalt 
spontaneity  even  at  the  expense  of  rationality,  his 
whole  theory  of  the  imagination  has  a  hectic  flush. 
He  tells  us  how  he  composed  —  but  of  course  failed 
to  jot  down  —  some  of  his  best  music  while  lying  ill 
of  fever,  and  regrets  that  record  cannot  be  kept  of 
the  sublime  imaginings  of  delirium.^  A  contempo- 
rary says  that  Rousseau  did  his  best  writing  only  when 
in  a  state  of  fever ;  and  Rousseau  himself  speaks  of 

'  Nouvelle  Helo'ise,  2'  partie,  lettre  ii. 

"  "  Le  pays  des  chime  res  est  en  ce  monde  le  seul  digne  d'etre 
habite,"  etc.  Nou7'elle  HHoise,  6'  partie,  lettre  viiL 
'  Confessions,  livre  vii. 

[70] 


THE   THEORY   OF   SPONTANEITY 

the  period  of  composition  of  his  greatest  books  as 
"  ten  years  of  fever  and  delirium."  '  The  frequency 
with  which  Rousseau  uses  the  word  dehrium  in  speak- 
ing of  his  own  imaginative  activity  suggests  the  phrase 
that  was  apphed  to  his  Uterary  descendants,  the 
French  romanticists,  —  les  amateiirs  du  delire.  The 
Cartesians  were  for  having  no  imagination  at  all,  the 
Rousseauists  will  be  satisfied  with  nothing  short  of  a 
frenzy  of  the  imagination.  The  neo-classicists  were 
for  confining  the  poetical  faculties  in  a  strait-jacket 
of  rules ;  it  is  hard  to  read  certain  romantic  poets, 
Victor  Hugo  for  example,  without  at  times  regret- 
ting the  absence  of  the  strait-jacket.  The  neo-clas- 
sicists, by  admitting  only  what  is  probable  to  the  un- 
derstanding, reduced  unduly  the  role  of  illusion,  the 
element  of  wonder  and  surprise. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  romanticists  too  often 
achieved  their  renascence  of  wonder  by  an  extinc- 
tion of  common  sense.  They  were  too  prone  to 
think  with  Professor  Saintsbury  that  when  good 
sense  comes  in  at  the  door,  poetry  and  imagination 
fly  out  at  the  window.  This  is  simply  the  neo- 
classical view  turned  upside  -  down  or  inside  -  out ; 

*  Premier  Dialogue. 

[70 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

and,  as  Sainte-Beuve  remarks,  nothing  resembles  a 
hollow  so  much  as  a  swelling. 

We  can  afford  to  linger  over  this  relation  between 
the  imaginative  and  the  rational,  or,  as  the  Aristote- 
lian theorist  would  have  said,  between  the  wonder- 
ful and  the  probable,  for  it  lies  at  the  very  centre 
of  any  right  distinction  between  classic  and  roman- 
tic art.  The  difference  is  fundamental  between  the 
man  who  looks  primarily  for  rationality  and  strict 
causal  connection  in  what  he  reads,  and  the  man 
who  seeks  primarily  for  adventure  and  surprise. 
The  man  who  is  too  slow  in  granting  that  willing 
suspension  of  disbelief  which,  according  to  Coleridge,  / 
constitutes  poetic  faith  ;  who  clings  too  rigidly  to 
his  rational  standards  and  keeps  harping  on  prob- 
ability in  this  sense,  may  justly  be  suspected  of  a 
lack  of  imagination.  This,  for  example,  is  the  fault 
with  Rymer  when  he  complains  of  Spenser  that 
"  blindly  rambling  on  marvelous  adventures  he  makes 
no  conscience  of  probability.  All  is  fanciful  and 
chimerical,  without  any  uniformity,  without  any 
foundation  in  truth  ;  his  poem  is  perfect  fairyland."  ' 

There  is  the  opposite  case  of  the  man  who  yields 

'  Preface  to  Rapin. 

[72]  I 


THE  THEORY   OF   SPONTANEITY 

his  poetic  faith  too  readily,  who  does  not  balk  at 
any  improbability.  This  is  evidently  true  of  chil- 
dren or  child-like  individuals.  There  is,  however,  a 
carelessness  of  rationality  and  a  love  of  the  mar- 
velous that,  instead  of  being  child-like,  is  a  symp- 
tom rather  of  over-refinement.  Such  a  difference, 
for  example,  we  feel  between  the  author  of  a 
genuine  old  Irish  saga  and  some  modern  Celtic 
revivalist.  In  the  one  we  have  to  do  with  a  really 
naYve  person  speaking  to  a  nai've  age  ;  in  the  other, 
with  an  aesthete  who  is  simply  isolating  himself  in 
his  tower  of  ivory.  In  a  late  Latin  writer  like  Apu- 
leius,  again,  we  see  the  nexus  of  cause  and  effect 
giving  way  to  a  series  of  somewhat  childish  sur- 
prises. The  decadent  Greeks,  as  Lucian  complains, 
yielded  to  a  somewhat  similar  spirit,  so  as  to  efface 
the  firm  lines  between  the  different  literary  genres. 
In  short,  a  renascence  of  wonder,  if  not  necessarily 
a  sign  of  decadence,  is  in  any  case  an  ambiguous 
event.  The  question  must  always  remain  whether  it 
stands  for  a  poetical  gain  or  a  loss  of  rationality ; 
whether  it  is  a  mark  of  imaginative  vigor  or  of  a 
debilitated  intellect.  The  probable,  says  Boileau,  is 
a  great  enemy  of  the  wonderful ;  and  so  indeed  it 
[73] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

is.  To  be  prosaic  and  sensible,  and  at  the  same  time 
unimaginative,  like  many  neo-classicists,  is  compara- 
tively easy ;  to  launch  forth  into  a  world  of  pure 
imaginative  illusion,  like  so  many  of  our  modern  ro- 
manticists, is  also  not  extremely  difficult ;  but  to 
show  one's  self  a  true  humanist,  that  is,  to  mediate 
between  these  extremes  and  occupy  all  the  space 
between  them  ;  to  be  probable  or  convincing  to  both 
the  imagination  and  the  understanding ;  to  satisfy 
the  standards  of  poetry  without  offending  the  stand- 
ards of  prose,  —  this  is  a  miracle  that  has  been 
achieved  only  by  the  great  poets. 

Even  the  most  hardened  of  the  neo-classic  critics 
recognized,  at  least  in  theory,  the  need  of  an  element 
of  wonder  in  creative  art ;  but  in  general  the  men 
of  the  Middle  Ages  seemed  to  them  to  have  enjoyed 
their  wonder  on  too  easy  terms.  The  adventures  and 
surprises  with  which  the  mediaeval  romances  are  filled 
were  not  sufficiently  linked  together  "  according  to 
probability  or  necessity."  This  use  of  the  idea  of 
probability  as  a  weapon  of  attack  against  mediaeval 
romance  is  common  in  the  critical  treatises  of  the 
sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries.  The  follow- 
ing from  Father  Mambrun's  treatise  on  the  Epic 
[74] 


THE  THEORY   OF   SPONTANEITY 

(page  173)  may  serve  as  a  sample:  "I  remember, 
when  I  was  a  boy,  reading  in  a  book  called  *  Fran- 
cus  Sagittarius  '  how  Zerbinus  fell  in  love  with  the 
maiden  Florizel,  and,  having  lost  all  hope  of  winning 
her,  threw  himself  headlong  into  the  sea.  The  ne- 
reids,  taken  by  the  beauty  of  the  youth,  receive  him 
lovingly ;  but  he  refuses  to  yield  to  their  blandish- 
ments, and  they,  incensed,  cast  him  out  into  the 
middle  of  the  waves.  At  that  very  moment  Queen 
Florizel  happened  to  be  walking  on  the  shore.  It 
happened  moreover  that  fishermen  caught  Zerbinus 
in  their  net  and  laid  him  out  on  the  shore,  thinking 
him  a  fish.  Wonderful  to  relate,  Zerbinus  gradually 
comes  to,  spitting  out  the  water,  and  not  knowing 
whether  he  is  alive  and  in  his  senses,  or  whether  he 
is  still  in  the  waves  or  in  the  palace  of  the  nereids; 
and  speaks  many  things  lovingly  about  Florizel  in 
her  very  presence." 

Here  are  stirring  adventures  indeed,  Father  Mam- 
brun  concludes,  but  lacking  as  they  do  in  prob- 
ability, they  are  worthy,  not  of  serious  poetry,  but 
only  of  old  wives'  tales  {fabellis  anilibiis) ;  as  Rymer 
would  say,  they  have  a  "  tang  of  the  old  woman." 
But  in  matters  of  this  kind  there  is  evidently  a 
[75] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

much  more  delicate  and  difficult  adjustment  than 
Mambrun  suspects  between  a  dull  fidelity  to  logic 
and  imaginative  illusion.  He  is  evidently  cap- 
able of  a  logical  but  not  of  a  poetic  faith.  The 
adventures  he  rejects  would  have  seemed  less  im- 
probable to  a  true  poet,  —  for  example,  to  the  author 
of  "  Endymion."  The  end,  says  Aristotle,  is  the 
chief  thing  of  all ;  but  Keats's  interest  is  not  so 
much  in  the  end  as  in  the  incidents  and  delights  of 
the  journey.  He  cares  little  for  the  logical  linking 
up  of  his  story,  if  only  it  afford  him  an  opportunity 
to  travel  in  the  realms  of  gold.  Poetry  thus  under- 
stood is  less  a  progress  toward  a  specific  goal  than 
a  somewhat  disconnected  series  of  beautiful  words 
and  beautiful  moments ;  and  this,  of  course,  is  to 
fall  into  an  opposite  excess  from  that  of  a  Mambrun 
or  a  Rymer,  but  an  excess  more  in  accord  perhaps 
with  the  ordinary  instincts  of  human  nature.  For 
human  nature,  impatient  at  best  of  the  discipline  of 
a  definite  purpose,  is  ever  eager  to  be  off  on  its 
"adventure  brave  and  new." 

"Nothing  is  beautiful  but  the  truth,"  says  Boi- 
leau ;  "the  truth  alone  is  lovely."  One  might  urge 
at  least  as  plausibly  that  it  is  easier  to  appeal  to 
[76] 


THE   THEORY   OF   SFONTAXEITY 

most  men  by  the  loveliness  of  error,  —  as  Erasmus 
has  in  fact  done  in  his  wise  book,  "The  Praise 
of  Folly."  Boileau's  more  poetical  contemporar)-. 
La  Fonraine,  in  the  course  of  a  delightful  account 
of  the  creative  imagination,  sa}-s  of  man's  power 
to  enchant  himself  with  his  own  dreams  :  — 

L'homme  est  de  glace  aux  verites, 
II  est  de  feu  pour  les  mensonges. 

Neo-classical  theon*  recognized  in  a  way  this  insa- 
tiable appetite  of  man  for  illusions,  that  he  is  hungry 
not  for  fact  but  for  fiction ;  only  it  would  ha\-e  the 
fiction  doled  out  to  him  under  the  supervision  of  the 
cold  and  calculating  understanding.  As  appears  so 
clearly  in  the  theor}-  of  the  three  unities,  it  concei\-ed 
of  the  creati\"e  artist  not  as  a  magician  but  as  a  de- 
liberate decei\-er.  as  one  whose  business  it  is  to  cheat 
the  intellect  rather  than  to  enchant  the  imagination.* 
Literar}-  movements  often  remind  one  of  the  law 
of  physics.  —  action  and  reaction  are  equal  and  in 
oppo&ite  directions.   The  neo-classicist  tried  to  im- 

*  Cf.  for  the  corresponding  idea  in  painting.  Eatteux.  Lts 
Ft\xuX'Arts  reaifits  i  mm  mrme  frimri*^  (pi.  25$) :  "  A  quoi  se 
rcduisent  toutes  les  regies  de  I.1  peinture?  i  tromper  les  yeux  i\ar 
U  ressemhl.uve.  a  nous  faire  croire  que  Tobjetest  reei.  tandis  que 
ce  n'est  quune  image.  Cela  est  evident." 

[  77  ] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

pose  the  standards  of  prose  upon  poetry,  Rousseau 
and  the  romanticists  carried  the  standards  of  poetry 
into  prose.  The  neo-classicist  desired  logic  and  re- 
aUty  without  illusion,  the  romanticist  would  have 
illusion  without  reality.  Rousseau  wished  to  banish 
'•"  rule  and  pale  forethought  "  not  only  from  litera- 
ture but  from  life.  When  a  youth  at  Turin,  he  tells 
us,  he  had  an  excellent  position  in  the  household  of 
the  Count  de  Gouvon,  a  position  that  would  have 
led  him  by  assured  stages  to  an  honorable  future. 
But  all  this  savored  for  him  too  much  of  cause  and 
effect ;  or,  as  he  puts  it,  he  "  saw  no  adventures  in 
it  all,"  and  so  "not  without  difficulty  "  he  got  him- 
self discharged,  and  wandered  off  one  fine  morning, 
in  order  that  he  might  taste  with  his  friend  Bade 
the  joys  of  vagabondage. 

Later,  at  the  Hermitage,  he  relates  that  he  was 
rude  to  visitors  who  recalled  him  to  earth  at  the 
moment  when  he  was  on  the  point  of  "  setting  out 
for  the  world  of  enchantment  "  {partir pour  le  vionde 
enchante).  "The  impossibility  of  attaining  to  real 
objects  cast  me  into  the  land  of  dreams  {le  pays  des 
chim^res),  and  seeing  no  actual  object  worthy  of  my 
delirium  I  nourished  it  in  an  ideal  world  that  my 
[78] 


THE  THEORY   OF   SPONTANEITY 

creative  imagination  had  soon  peopled  with  beings 
according  to  my  heart."  '  The  creative  imagination 
is  thus  for  Rousseau  a  means  of  escape  into  a  land 
of  heart's  desire,  a  world  of  sheer  unreality.  Rous- 
seau would  have  sympathized  with  that  ancient, 
who,  as  Horace  narrates,  had  the  gift  of  witnessing 
gorgeous  spectacles  in  an  empty  theatre,  and  who, 
when  restored  to  his  senses  by  copious  doses  of 
hellebore,  cried  out  to  his  officious  friends  that  they 
had  undone  him  and  not  saved  him  by  thus  bring- 
ing him  back  to  a  dull  reality  and  robbing  him  of 
his  delightful  dreams.  This  ancient  was,  indeed, 
merely  a  romanticist  born  out  of  due  season.  Does 
not  Keats  in  his  tale  pronounce  his  curse,  not  upon 
the  snake- woman,  but  upon  "the  sage,  old  Apol- 
lonius,"  the  type  of  a  hateful  rationality  that  dis- 
pelled the  magic  vision  {mentis  gratissimus  error) 

and 

made 
The  tender-personed  Lamia  melt  into  a  shade  ? 

The  romanticist  is  ready  to  fly  into  the  arms  even 
of  a  false  enchantress  rather  than  submit  to  "  cold 
philosophy."    Any  vision,  though  it  be  the  vision  of 

'  Confessions,  2«  partie,  livre  ix  (1756). 
[79] 


THE  NEW   LAOKOON 

vertigo,  or  delirium,  or  intoxication,  the  mere  fumes 
of  opium  or  alcohol,  is  to  be  courted  if  only  it  bring 
oblivion  of  prose. 

Voltaire  says  that  imagination  is  not  to  be  es- 
teemed when  it  is  divorced  from  rationality  and 
judgment.  For  example,  fairy  tales  are  immensely 
imaginative,  yet  we  despise  them  because  of  their 
lack  of  "  order  and  good-sense."  Not  many  years 
later  Novalis  proclaimed  fairy  tales  to  be  the  highest 
form  of  art  just  because  they  lacked  logical  co- 
herency, and  converted  the  world  into  a  •*  magic 
dream-picture,  a  musical  fantasy."  '  In  thus  sacrific- 
ing the  probable  so  completely  to  the  wonderful,  the 
romanticist  is  naturally  led  to  exalt  childhood.  Dr. 
Johnson  says  that  wonder  is  "  a  pause  of  reason." 
But  for  the  child  it  is  not  even  a  pause  of  reason 
since  reason  can  scarcely  be  said  to  have  begun. 
Wherever  children  are,  says  Novalis,  there  is  the 
golden  age.  For  the  child,  life  is  still  an  adventure, 
a  succession  of  beautiful  moments  each  independent 
of  the  last,  a  series  of  ever  fresh  surprises  ;  childhood 

*  R.  Haym  has  brought  together  and  discussed  the  utter- 
ances of  Novalis  on  this  subject  (Die  romantische  Schule, 
p.  378). 

[8oj 


THE   THEORY   OF    SPONTANEITY 

is  the  age  of  unreflective  happiness,  of  vivid  and 
spontaneous  sensation,  — 

the  hour 
Of  splendor  in  the  grass,  of  glory  in  the  flower. 

The  romanticist,  we  must  admit,  is  often  happily 
inspired  by  this  poetry  of  childhood.  Rousseau  was. 
not  only  before  everything  else  an  apostle  of  spon- 
taneity, but,  unlike  many  other  apostles,  he  actually 
achieved  what  he  preached.  Some  of  the  pages  in 
which  he  celebrates  his  escape  from  artificiality  and 
the  "  meddling  intellect,"  and  describes  his  Arcadian 
revery  close  to  the  bosom  of  Nature,  have  still  an 
incomparable  freshness  and  charm.  No  verses  again 
are  more  inevitable  than  those  of  Wordsworth  at  his 
best.  "Nature,"  as  Matthew  Arnold  says,  "seems 
to  take  the  pen  out  of  his  hand  and  to  write  for  him 
with  her  own  bare,  sheer,  penetrating  power."  Some 
of  the  shorter  poems  of  Blake,  to  take  another  ex- 
ample almost  at  random,  are  admirable  for  a  naive 
and  childlike  wonder.  At  the  same  time  we  cannot 
scrutinize  too  closely  this  craving  for  a  renascence  of 
wonder  ;  for  as  I  have  already  said,  instead  of  being 
a  sign  of  real  naturalness  and  simplicity,  it  often 
marks  the  last  stage  of  over-refinement.  Walt  Whit- 
[8i] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

man,  for  instance,  so  far  from  being  the  poet  of 
natural  and  simple  people,  is  rather  the  poet  of  the 
over-civilized.  The  more  one  considers  the  question, 
indeed,  the  wider  appears  the  gap  between  the 
primitivism  of  the  Rousseauist  and  the  genuinely- 
primitive  traits  that  reveal  themselves  in  the  child- 
hood of  either  the  individual  or  the  race.  Romantic 
primitivism  is  the  source  of  our  modern  confusion 
of  the  arts,  as  well  as  of  many  other  confusions,  and 
so  we  shall  need  to  consider  certain  aspects  of  it 
carefully,  though  without  any  attempt  to  be  ex- 
haustive. 

In  the  first  place  the  child  is  not  self-conscious. 
The  romanticist  on  the  contrary,  though  willing  to 
purchase  his  renascence  of  wonder  by  an  eclipse  of 
reason,  finds  that  the  reason  often  refuses  to  be 
eclipsed  in  spite  of  his  efforts  to  drug  and  narcotize 
it.  It  looks  down  mockingly  on  the  part  of  the  self 
that  is  trying  to  become  naive  and  primitive,  and 
there  arises  that  conflict  of  the  head  and  the  heart 
that  assumes  so  many  forms  in  the  romantic  move- 
ment from  Rousseau  down,  one  form  being  the  self- 
parody  of  so-called  romantic  irony.  Romantic  irony 
will,  of  course,  be  at  its  maximum  in  a  writer  like 
[82] 


j 


THE  THEORY   OF   SPONTANEITY 

Heine,  who  is  at  once  intensely  sentimental  and 
keenly  intellectual  Childhood  moreover  is  the  period 
of  play,  and  so  the  romanticists  proclaimed  that  art 
and  literature  should  not  accept  the  discipline  of 
a  definite  purpose  but  should  also  be  merely  forms 
of  play.'  But  the  romantic  primitivist  is  curiously 
different  in  his  ways  of  playing  from  the  genuine 
child.  Children's  games  have  rules,  some  of  them 
in  fact  being  about  as  highly  regulated  as  seven- 
teenth-century tragedy.  By  observing  these  outer 
forms  children  do  homage  in  their  way  to  the  god 
Terminus.  Children  and  savages  indeed  are  in  many 
respects  the  most  conventional  of  beings.  The  ro- 
mantic primitivist  on  the  other  hand  is  inspired 
above  all  by  the  desire  to  escape  from  the  conven- 
tional. In  dealing  with  the  arts  and  literature  espe- 
cially he  would  discard  all  the  old  formal  distinc- 
tions, and  then  instead  of  seeking  for  a  higher 
discipline  would  rest  in  the  delightful  sense  of  having 
got  rid  of  all  boundaries  and  limitations  whatsoever. 

*  The  most  important  expression  of  the  play  theory  of  art  is 
found  in  Schiller's  Esthetic  Letters,  a  work  written  under  the 
combined  influence  of  Rousseau  and  Kant  and  of  Rousseau 
through  Kant. 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

"  It  is  the  beginning  of  all  poetry,"  says  Fried- 
rich  Schlegel,  "to  abolish  the  laws  and  method  of 
the  rationally  proceeding  reason,  and  to  plunge  us 
once  more  into  the  ravishing  confusions  of  fantasy, 
the  original  chaos  of  human  nature."  Things  are 
no  longer  seen  analytically,  "in  disconnection  dead 
and  spiritless,"  but  in  a  sort  of  emotional  unity, 
where  everything  is  so  bound  together  that  when 
one  sense  receives  a  vivid  impression  the  other 
senses  thrill  sympathetically ;  where  all  frontiers 
vanish  away  and  all  firm  outlines  melt  together  in 
vague  and  voluptuous  revery.  Let  us  listen  once 
more  to  Novalis,  who,  it  will  be  remembered,  set  up 
the  fairy  tale  as  the  canon  of  art :  "  One  can  imagine 
tales  without  more  coherence  than  the  different 
stages  of  a  dream,  poems  which  are  melodious  and 
full  of  beautiful  words  but  destitute  of  meaning  or 
connection ;  at  most  comprehensible  stanzas  here 
and  there,  like  fragments  of  perfectly  unrelated 
things.  This  true  poetry  can  of  course  have  only  a 
symbolical  significance  and  an  indirect  effect  like 
music."  This  passage  does  not  describe  the  kind  of 
art  that  will  ever  appeal  to  any  normal  child  ;  it  does 
describe  remarkably  what  many  nineteenth-century 
[84] 


THE  THEORY  OF   SPONTANEITY 

artists,  from  Novalis  himself  down  to  the  French 
symbohsts,  have  actually  attempted. 

This  type  of  art  may  be  defined  as  illusion  for 
the  sake  of  illusion,  a  mere  Nepenthe  of  the  spirit, 
a  means  not  of  becoming  reconciled  to  reality  but 
of  escaping  from  it.  Yet  many  of  the  writers  and 
artists  who  thus  take  flight  into  a  pays  des  ckimkres 
would  at  the  same  time  pose  as  mystics  or  Platonic 
idealists.  In  fact,  it  is  almost  normal  for  the  roman- 
ticist, on  breaking  away  from  the  authority  of 
Aristotle  and  the  neo-classical  rules,  to  put  him- 
self under  the  patronage  of  Plato.  For  example, 
A.  W.  Schlegel  sets  out  to  show  how  very  much 
"the  anatomical  ideas  which  have  been  stamped  as 
rules  are  below  the  essential  requisites  of  poetry"; 
how,  permitting  as  they  do  of  an  appeal  to  the  under- 
standing only,  they  have  entirely  missed  the  nature 
of  true  poetical  illusion ;  and  Schlegel  gives  what  is 
in  many  respects  an  admirable  account  of  this  true 
illusion.  "  It  is,"  he  says,  "a  waking  dream  to  which 
we  voluntarily  surrender  ourselves."  He  then  pro- 
ceeds to  score  both  Aristotle  and  Lessing  for  not 
having  done  justice  to  this  emotional  factor  in  art,  for 
having  been  analytical  where  they  should  have  been 
[85] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

imaginative,  and  adds  :  "  Were  I  to  select  a  guide 
from  among  the  ancient  philosophers  it  should  un- 
doubtedly be  Plato,  who  acquired  the  idea  of  the 
beautiful,  not  by  dissection  which  can  never  give 
it,  but  by  intuitive  inspiration,"  '  etc.  The  passage 
is  typical.  We  are,  in  fact,  forced  to  inquire  whether 
the  romantic  writers  were  true  Platonists,  just  as  we 
were  led  to  inquire  whether  the  neo-classic  writers 
were  true  Aristotelians.  This  inquiry  is  essential  to 
our  subject  and  deserves  to  be  treated  in  a  separate 
chapter. 

*  Dramatic  Art  and  Literature,  Lecture  xvii.  Schlegel  had  a 
rather  unexpected  predecessor  in  his  ideas  about  true  illusion  — 
Dr.  Johnson  (in  his  Preface  to  Shakespeare).  Schlegel  makes 
proper  acknowledgment  to  Johnson  (p.  249,  Bohn  translation). 


CHAPTER   V 

PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

"  Every  man,"  says  Coleridge,  "  is  born  an  Aristo- 
telian or  a  Platonist."  In  an  important  sense  this 
saying  is  true,  though  actual  human  nature  is  of 
course  not  quite  so  simple.  In  the  first  place,  there 
are  the  many  persons  whom  it  would  be  an  extrava- 
gant compliment  to  call  either  Platonists  or  Aristo- 
telians ;  who  are,  in  Carlylean  phrase,  merely  patent 
digesters.  Then  there  are  the  pseudo-Aristotelians 
of  whom  we  have  already  spoken,  as  well  as  the 
pseudo-Platonists  of  whom  we  shall  speak  presently, 
not  to  mention  the  mixed  and  intermediary  types, 
or  the  ways  in  which  the  same  man  may  shift  from 
one  point  of  view  to  the  other  according  to  the 
mood  and  the  moment.  Plato  himself  was  not  a 
Platonist  in  the  meaning  that  is  often  given  to  the 
term,  nor  was  Aristotle  an  Aristotelian;  that  is, 
Plato  was  not  merely  a  sublime  enthusiast,  any 
more  than  Aristotle  was  content  with  a  dry  anal- 
ysis, Plato  and  Aristotle  were  like  other  sensible 
[87] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

people  who,  whatever  they  may  have  been  "  born," 
try  to  maintain  some  balance  between  the  analytic 
and  the  synthetic  elements  in  their  thinking. 

Yet  when  Plato  is  most  analytic  and  Aristotle 
most  synthetic,  we  still  feel  the  difference  of  tem- 
per ;  so  that  Aristotle  and  Plato  may  rightly  be 
taken  after  all  as  the  supreme  examples  respectively 
of  the  analytic  and  the  synthetic  minds.  We  have 
therefore  been  justified  in  calling  certain  confusions 
that  arose  from  a  false  analysis  during  the  neo- 
classical period  pseudo-Aristotelian ;  we  shall  also  be 
justified  in  calling  pseudo-Platonic  certain  other  con- 
fusions which  have  arisen  from  a  false  synthesis  and 
which  pervade  not  merely  modern  art  and  literature, 
but  modern  life. 

The  taking  in  vain  of  the  name  of  Plato  is  of 
course  nothing  new.  For  example,  many  of  the 
Petrarchists  of  the  Renaissance  were  as  fond  of 
posing  as  Platonists  as  any  modern  romanticist,  — 
and  with  about  as  much  reason.  We  cannot  attempt 
a  complete  study  of  so  vast  a  subject  as  the  differ- 
ence between  true  and  false  Platonism.  We  must 
confine  ourselves  to  the  main  distinctions  that  are 
necessary  for  the  present  subject,  and  these  distinc- 
[88] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

tions  may  perhaps  best  be  reached  by  comparing 
Plato  with  Rousseau,  the  most  representative  figure 
in  European  romanticism.  There  is  a  certain  super- 
ficial likeness  between  the  two  men :  each  lived  in 
an  intensely  self-conscious  age,  when  analysis  was 
dissolving  traditional  standards  and  threatening  as 
it  seemed  the  very  foundations  of  conduct.  Rousseau 
attacked  the  pJiilosophes  about  as  Plato  attacked  the 
sophists.  They  both  look  with  suspicion  on  litera- 
ture and  the  theatre,  and  they  both  oppose  to  the 
corruption  of  their  time  a  sort  of  ideal  Sparta.  But 
if  there  is  some  agreement  in  their  diagnosis  of  the 
diseases  of  an  advanced  civilization,  there  is  none  at 
all  in  their  remedies.  Rousseau  strolls  off  into  the 
forest  of  Saint-Germain,  and  indulges  in  a  dream  of 
the  golden  age  which  he  then  asserts  to  be  a  true 
vision  of  the  life  of  primitive  man,  —  man  still  at 
one  with  himself  and  his  fellows,  before  he  had  lost 
his  ignorance,  before  the  growth  of  intellect  had 
weakened  the  bond  of  sympathy  and  converted  the 
peaceful  selfishness  tempered  by  "natural  pity," 
that  one  finds  at  the  origin,  into  a  warring  egoism. 
He  therefore  looks  back  with  nostalgic  longing  on 
the  "  state  of  nature  "  from  which  man  has  fallen, 
[89] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

and  with  corresponding  distrust  on  the  faculties  of 
the  mind  that  have  destroyed  this  spontaneity  of 
instinct,  weakened  the  bond  of  communal  sympathy, 
and  brought  man  into  conflict  with  himself  and 
others.  He  even  raises  the  question  whether  a  cer- 
tain tribe  on  the  Orinoco  has  not  been  wise  in  bind- 
ing up  the  heads  of  the  children  in  planks,  thus  ar- 
resting their  intellectual  development  and  assuring 
them  some  portion  of  their  primitive  felicity. 

Plato  on  the  contrary  does  not  dream  of  any  re- 
turn to  nature.  He  sees  the  luxury  and  egoism  and 
self-indulgence  that  have  come  with  the  weakening 

)of  traditional  standards,  and  sets  out  in  search  of 
inner   standards    to   take  the  place  of  the   outer 
■  standards  that  have  been  lost.   Instead  of  getting 
rid  of  discipline,  like  Rousseau,  and  hoping  to  over- 
come selfishness  by  reverting  to  the  pristine  warmth 
of  sympathy,  Plato  would  press  forward,  using  the 
intellectual  faculties  themselves  as  stepping-stones, 
to  a  higher  discipline  which  leads  in  turn  to  a  new 
I  sense  of  unity,  a  sense  of  unity  that  we  may  term,  in 
L  opposition  to  Rousseau's  unity  of  instinct,  the  unity 
/  of  insight.  Rousseau's  view  of  life  is  above  all  emo- 
tional, that  of  Plato  supremely  disciplinary  (indeed 
[90] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

he  may  fairly  be  accused  in  a  later  work,  like  the 
"Laws,"  of  overdoing  the  disciphne).  The  unity  of 
Plato  is  associated  with  a  concentration  of  the_will, 
that  of  Rousseau  with  an  expansion  of  the  feelings. 
A  recent  historian  of  Greek  philosophy '  remarks 
that  Plato  would  not  have  understood  the  role 
Schopenhauer  assigns  to  pity  (Schopenhauer  being 
in  this  respect  a  Rousseauist),  and  would  utterly  have 
despised  the  charms  of  sensibility  as  depicted  by 
Rousseau.  These  remarks  go  far  in  establishing 
the  difference  between  Rousseauists  and  Platonists, 
between  those  whose  chief  interest  is  in  the  things 
that  are  below  the  reason  and  those  who  are  chiefly 
interested  in  the  things  that  are  above  it. 

The  radical  divergence  of  the  two  classes  always 
appears^in  their  attitude  toward  the  intellectual  facul- 
ties. Socrates,  according  to  Rousseau,  praises  igno- 
rance. Rousseaudoes  not  often  indulge  in  such  an  un- 
blushing sophism.  What  Socrates  actually  asserted, 
of  course,  was,  that  though  men  imagine  they  know 
something  they  are  in  reality  ignorant.  The  Ameri- 
can scientist  who  complained  only  the  other  day  that 
nobody  knows  more  than  seven  billionths  of  one 

'  See  T.  Gomperz,  Greek  Thittkers,  III,  p.  ii6. 
[91] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

per  cent  about  anything,  was  merely  echoing  what 
Socrates  said  many  centuries  ago  at  Athens.  But 
Socrates  would  have  men  cherish  preciously  this  frac- 
tion of  knowledge,  however  infinitesimal,  and  the  fac- 
ulties by  which  they  have  attained  it,  in  the  hope  that 
they  may  ultimately  add  to  it  a  few  more  billionths 
of  a  per  cent.  We  can  imagine  with  what  irony  he 
would  have  greeted  any  Wordsworthian  or  Rous- 
seauistic  talk  about  "  the  false  secondary  power  by 
which  we  multiply  distinctions."  On  the  contrary 
he  spent  his  whole  life  in  multiplying  distinctions, 
and  may  indeed  be  regarded  as  the  founder  of  formal 
logic. 

We  have  here  a  touchstone  for  separating  not 
merely  Platonists  from  pseudo-Platonists  but  also 
true  from  false  mystics.  For  if  some  of  our  Rous- 
seauists  have  posed  as  Platonists,  others,  as  I  have 
said,  have  looked  on  themselves  as  mystics.  But  the 
true  mystic  is  not  much  given  to  mere  revery  ;  it  is  a 
historic  fact  that  he  has  often  shown  himself  remark- 
ably shrewd  and  practical ;  and  in  any  case  he  lives 
on  good  terms  with  his  intellect.  He  is  ready  to  fol- 
low it  until  it  brings  him  to  the  point  where  he  must 
intrust  himself  to  a  still  higher  power,  —  a  moment 
[92] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

Dante  has  symbolized  in  the  passage  of  the  "  Pur- 
gatorio "  where  Virgil  ceases  to  be  his  guide  and 
gives  way  to  Beatrice.  If  we  find  that  a  man  attains 
his  vision  only  by  a  denial  of  rationality,  we  may  at 
once  suspect  that  we  are  dealing  with  a  pseudo- 
mystic.  Professor  Santayana  writes:  "In  casting 
off  with  self-assurance  and  a  sense  of  fresh  vitality 
the  distinctions  of  tradition  and  reason  a  man  may 
feel,  as  he  sinks  back  comfortably  to  a  lower  level 
of  sense  and  instinct,  that  he  is  returning  to  Nature 
or  escaping  into  the  infinite.  Mysticism  makes  us 
proud  and  happy  to  renounce  the  work  of  intelli- 
gence both  in  thought  and  in  life,  and  persuades  us 
that  we  become  divine  by  remaining  imperfectly 
human."  '  But  this  passage  is  not  a  description  of 
the  genuine  mystic  at  all,  but  merely  of  the  Rous- 
seauist,  and  as  such  it  is  excellent. 

Of  course,  things  are  not  so  clear-cut  in  concrete 
human  nature  as  they  are  in  our  formulae.  The 
sense  of  what  is  above  the  reason  sometimes  merges 
bewilderingly  into  the  sense  of  what  is  below  the 
reason.  There  are,  for  example,  touches  of  true  mys- 
tical insight  in  Wordsworth,  along  with  other  pas- 

'  Foetjy  a7id  Religion,  p.  187. 
[93] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

sages  almost  equally  admirable  as  poetry,  if  not  equally 
wise,  but  passages  at  any  rate  that  are  more  Rous- 
seauistic  than  Platonic.  Thus  the  famous  Ode  is  a 
curious  blend  of  Plato  and  Rousseau,  —  of  the  Pla- 
tonic doctrine  of  reminiscence  of  previous  existence 
and  the  Rousseauistic  reminiscence  of  childhood  as 
the  age  of  freshness  and  spontaneity.  To  the  belief 
that  "  our  birth  is  but  a  sleep  and  a  forgetting  "^es- 
Plato  would  of  course  have  assented  ;  but  the  as- 
sertion that  children  of  six  are  "  mighty  prophets, 
seers  blessed,"  would,  we  may  fear,  have  seemed  to 
him  portentous  nonsense ;  and  there  are  doubtless 
still  a  few  persons  left  who  would  agree  with  Plato. 
Wordsworth  indeed  has  so  mingled  the  things  that 
are  above  with  the  things  that  are  below  the  rea- 
son as  not  merely  to  idealize  but  to  supernaturalize 
the  child,  and  this  probably  would  have  dissatisfied 
Rousseau  as  well  as  Plato. 

A  man  becomes  un-Platonic  and  pseudo-mystical 
in  direct  ratio  to  his  contempt  for  rationality  as  com- 
pared with  the  unconscious,  the  spontaneous,  the 
instinctive.  The  speeches  of  all  the  sages,  says 
Maeterlinck,  are  outweighed  by  the  unconscious 
wisdom  of  the  passing  child.  *'  L'enfant  qui  se  tait 
[94] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

est  mille  fois  plus  sage  que  Marc  Aurele  qui  parle." 
This  is  not  the  utterance  of  a  genuine  mystic,  but 
of  a  Rousseauist  who  pays  to  what  is  below  the  rea- 
son the  homage  that  is  due  only  to  what  is  above  it ; 
who  with  all  his  glorification  of  the  child  does  not 
attain  the  truly  childlike,  but  merely  the  confused 
revery  and  sense  of  strangeness  that  come  from 
emancipating  the  subliminal  self  from  rational  con- 
trol. Insight  does  not  thus  confound  the  subcon- 
scious with  the  superconscious  and  abolish  all  the 
distinctions  of  the  intellect  in  the  process.  It  draws 
with  special  sharpness  the  very  line  that  the  Rous- 
seauist would  obliterate  —  that  between  man  and 
nature.  So  far  from  encouraging  a  return  to  nature, 
it  rather  makes  one  feel,  as  Arnold  puts  it,  that  man 
and  nature  can  never  be  fast  friends.  The  more  mys- 
tical the  insight  becomes,  the  stronger  this  feeling 
is  likely  to  be.  It  may  very  well  lead  to  an  attitude 
toward  outer  nature,  that  is  not  simply  indifferent 
but  ascetic  ;  and  this  of  course  is  the  opposite  excess 
from  that  of  the  Rousseauist.  "There  is  surely  a 
piece  of  divinity  within  us,"  says  Sir  Thomas  Browne, 
"  something  that  was  before  the  elements  and  owes 
no  homage  unto  the  sun."  The  new  unity  that  the 
[95] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

sentimental  naturalist  or  Rousseauist  proclaims  as- 
sumes the  exact  opposite.  According  to  the  Rous- 
seauist, we  should  overcome  the  sense  of  the  sepa- 
rateness  of  man  and  nature  of  which  Sir  Thomas 
Browne  speaks,  and  arrive  rather  at  a  "  sense  sub- 
lime "  of  their  common  essence,  of  a  something,  as 
Wordsworth  goes  on  to  say,  "  whose  dwelling  is  the 
light  of  setting  suns  and  in  the  mind  of  man." 

Formerly  not  merely  the  Platonist  and  the  mys- 
tic, but  the  ordinary  humanist,  looked  on  outer  na- 
ture as  alien,  or  at  least  irrelevant,  to  the  highest 
interests  of  man.  Indeed,  Plato  himself  has  ren- 
dered admirably  at  the  beginning  of  the  "  Phae- 
drus  "  the  humanistic  attitude  toward  nature,  —  an 
attitude  as  far  removed  from  indifference  or  ascetic 
distrust  as  it  is  from  the  worship  of  the  Rousseau- 
ist. Socrates,  we  there  read,  so  far  from  looking  on 
books  as  a  "  vain  and  endless  strife,"  had  allowed 
Phaedrus  to  entice  him  out  into  the  country  by  the 
hope  of  reading  a  book,  much  as  "  the  hungry  flocks 
are  led  on  by  those  who  shake  leaves  or  some  fruit 
before  them."  But  once  in  the  country  Socrates 
feels  so  keenly  and  describes  so  happily  its  fresh- 
ness and  charm,  that  Phaedrus  expresses  surprise 
[96] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

that  he  does  not  come  oftener ;  and  Socrates  re- 
pHes:  "The  fields  and  trees  will  not  teach  me  any- 
thing but  men  in  the  city  do."  If  we  compare  the 
Platonic  Socrates  with  the  Wordsworthian  sage 
whose  "daily  teachers  had  been  woods  and  rills," 
we  shall  perceive  the  gap  between  the  humanist  of 
the  old  type  and  the  modern  sentimental  naturalist. 
We  have  already  seen  how  easily  this  humanistic 
point  of  view  may  be  exaggerated.  Lessing's  atti- 
tude toward  landscape-painting  is  an  example.  For 
the  purposes  of  art  at  least  Lessing  was  not  willing 
to  grant  that  the  landscape  is  a  state  of  the  soul. 
For  Lessing,  as  for  every  trueclassicist,  the  highest 
thing  in  art  is  the  plot  or  design  and  the  subordi- 
nating of  everything  else  to  its  orderly  development. 
There  is  evidently  an  antinomy  between  this  concen- 
tration of  the  will  on  a  definite  end,  and  the  jnood 
of  melting  into  nature  that  has  been  so  cultivated: 
by  our  modern  romanticists.  What  Hazlitt  says  of 
Raphael  applies  equally  to  Lessing :  "  Raphael  not 
only  could  not  paint  a  landscape  ;  he  could  not  paint, 
people  in  a  landscape.  .  .  .  His  figures  have  always 
an  in-door  look,  that  is,  a  set,  determined,  voluntary,, 
dramatic  character,  arising  from  their  own  passions,, 
[97] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

or  a  watchfulness  of  those  of  others,  and  want  that 
wild  uncertainty  of  expression  which  is  connected 
with  the  accidents  of  nature  and  the  changes  of  the 
elements.    He  has  nothing  romafitic  about  him." 

This  interpenetration  of  nature  and  human  nature, 
this  running  together  in  revery,  not  merely  of  the 
different  planes  of  being  but,  as  we  shall  see  pre- 
sently, of  the  different  sense-impressions  on  the 
physical  plane,  is  the  point  of  departure  of  all  our 
distinctively  modern  confusions.  The  refusal  to  sac- 
rifice the  firm  distinctions  established  by  the  intel- 
lect and  enforced  by  the  will  between  the  planes  of 
being  is  in  general  the  chief  difference  between  the 
Platonist  and  the  Rousseauist,  This  difference  comes 
out  with  special  clearness  at  the  very  point  where 
the  Rousseauist  usually  claims  to  be  most  Platonic, 
—  in  his  conception  of  love.  Byron  says  that  Rous- 
seau was  a  lover  of  "  ideal  Beauty,"  and  one  imme- 
diately thinks  of  Plato.  But  let  us  not  be  the  dupes 
of  fine  phrases.  In  his  dealings  with  love  as  with 
everything  else  Plato  invariably  shows  himself  what 
Wordsworth  would  call  an  "  officious  slave  "  of  the 
**  false  secondary  power  by  which  we  multiply  dis- 
tinctions." He  distinguishes  between  an  earthly  and 
[98] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

an  Uranian  Aphrodite,  and  while  recognizing  that 
the  first  may  be  a  stepping-stone  to  the  second, 
never  actually  confounds  the  two.  Every  one,  on 
the  other  hand,  must  have  been  struck  with  the 
indiscriminate  use  of  the  word  love  in  the  romantic 
movement.  Alfred  de  Musset,  for  example,  does 
not  draw  any  clear  line  between  his  love  for  God 
and  his  love  for  a  grisette.  If  any  individual  roman- 
ticist escapes  from  this  error,  he  has  to  thank  the 
coldness  of  his  temperament  or  the  accidents  of 
his  training  and  environment  rather  than  his  phi- 
losophy. 

The  biographer  of  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti  says 
that  Rossetti's  message  to  the  world  is  summed  up 
in  such  lines  as  — 

Lady,  I  fain  would  tell  how  evermore 
Thy  soul  I  know  not  from  thy  body,  nor 
Thee  from  myself,  neither  our  love  from  God. 

So  far  from  separating  the  earthly  and  heavenly 
loves  Rossetti  evidently  mixes  them  in  one  intoxi- 
cating brew.  The  ultimate  origins  of  this  modern 
mixture  are  doubtless  mediaeyal,  but  for  the  forms 
of  it  that  bear  upon  our  subject  we  do  not  need  to 
go  behind  Rousseau.  Joubert  is  probably  the  first 
[99] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

to  point  out  how  pervasive  in  Rousseau  is  this  par- 
ticular confusion  of  the  planes  of  being :  "  Rousseau 
had  a  voluptuous  mind.  In  his  writings  the  soul  is 
always  mingled  with  the  body  and  never  distinct 
from  it.  No  one  has  ever  rendered  more  vividly  the 
impression  of  the  flesh  touching  the  spirit  and  the 
delights  of  their  marriage." 

Now  Joubert  remarks  elsewhere  that  spirit  and 
matter  can  come  into  relation  with  one  another  only 
through  the  medium  of  illusion ;  and  he  goes  on  to 
say  some  of  the  most  penetrating  things  that  have 
been  said  by  any  writer  about  the  role  of  imagina- 
tive illusion  in  mediating  between  the  lower  and 
the  higher  nature  of  man.  Joubert,  we  should  add, 
was  a  genuine  Platonist  in  an  age  when  pseudo- 
Platonism  was  rife,  though  at  times  he  tends  to  fall 
into  excessive  subtlety,  to  be  too  vaporous  and  ethe- 
real. Joubert,  then,  conceives  it  to  be  the  role  of 
the  imagination,  mediating  as  it  does  between  sense 
and  reason,  to  lend  its  magic  and  glamour  to  the 
latter,  to  throw  as  it  were  a  veil  of  divine  illusion 
over  some  essential  truth.  Perhaps  this  is  as  fair  a 
statement  as  can  be  made  of  the  ahn  of  the  highest 
art,  though  it  may  evidently  become  a  pretext  for 
[  lOo] 


PLATOXISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

falling  into  a  lifeless  allegory.'  The  imagination 
must  be  really  free  and  spontaneous,  and  the  truth 
itself  must  not  be  too  precisely  formulated,  if  we  are 
to  arrive  at  that  vital  fusing  of  illusion  and  insight 
with  the  accompanying  sense  of  infinitude  that  is 
found  in  the  true  symbol. 

This  alliance  of  the  imagination  and  reason,  of  / 
V illusion  et  la  sagesse^  is  something  that  transcends 
all  rule,  and  is  indeed  so  difficult  that  it  has  seemed 
even  to  great  thinkers  impossible.  We  have  already 
mentioned  Pascal's  attack  on  the  imagination.  The 
imagination,  he  says,  is  "  a  mistress  of  error  and 
falsity,"  "a  proud  power  hostile  to  reason,"  so  rein- 
forcing with  its  illusions  the  affections  and  impres- 
sions of  sense  that  reason  will  inevitably  succumb, 
unless  it  has  the  aid  of  a  sort  of  deiis  ex  machitia  in 
the  form  of  a  divine  revelation.  This  theory  reveals 
of  course  profound  insight  into  the  ordinary  facts  of 
human  nature,  and  goes  vastly  deeper  than  any  idle 
chatter  about  art  for  art's  sake.  Yet  it  has  in  it 
something  morose  and  ascetic,  inasmuch  as  it  seems 

'  This  was  the  frequent  result  of  a  somewhat  similar  view  of 
art  in  the  Middle  Ages.    Cf.  Petrarch's  phrase  :   Veritatem  rerum 

pulchris  velaminibus  adornare. 

[lOl] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

to  deny  that  alliance  between  illusion  and  rationality, 
or,  in  Aristotelian  parlance,  between  the  wonderful 
and  the  probable,  that  is  actually  found  in  the  great- 
est poetry,  pagan  as  well  as  Christian.  In  any  case 
the  theory  does  not  hold  out  much  hope  for  the 
modern  man.  He  is  likely  to  find  more  to  his  purpose 
in  the  remarkable  theory  of  the  imagination  outlined 
by  Bacon  in  his  "Advancement  of  Learning."  He 
is  discussing  the  role  of  rhetoric  and  rhetorical  per- 
suasion in  a  scheme  of  studies.  "  Reason,"  he  says, 
"would  become  captive  and  servile  if  eloquence  of 
persuasion  did  not  practice  and  win  the  imagination 
from  the  affection's  part,  and  contract  a  confederacy 
between  the  reason  and  imagination  against  the 
affections.  For  the  affections  themselves  carry  ever 
an  appetite  to  good  as  the  reason  doth  ;  the  differ- 
ence is  that  the  affection  beholdeth  merely  the  present ; 
reason  beholdeth  tJie  future  and  smn  of  time ;  and 
therefore,  the  present  filling  the  imagination  more, 
reason  is  commonly  vanquished ;  but  after  that  force 
of  eloquence  and  persuasion  hath  made  things  future 
and  remote  appear  as  present,  then  upon  the  revolt 
of  the  imagination  reason  prevaileth." 

Great  poetry,  as  Longinus  would  say,  does  not 
[  I02] 


PLATONISTSAND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

act  by  persuasion  but  by  ecstasy  ;  otherwise  Bacon's 
theory  has  evident  points  of  similarity  with  that  of 
Joubert.  Perhaps  there  are  no  better  examples  of 
the  mingling  of  illusion  and  insight  that  Joubert  re- 
quires than  some  of  the  '*  myths  "  of  Plato.  Plato 
indeed  is  not  only  one  of  the  most  imaginative  and 
spontaneous  of  writers,  but  his  spontaneity  is  not 
a  denial  but  rather  a  completion  of  the  work  of 
reason.  Just  as  we  have  distinguished  therefore  be- 
tween the  Platonic  unity  of  insight  and  the  unity  of  j 
instinct  of  which  the  Rousseauist  dreams,  so  we  may 
contrast  with  the  spontaneity  of  Rousseau  a  higher 
spontaneity  where  the  powers  of  illusion  are  in  the 
service  of  the  reason  and  not  of  the  senses.  This 
whole  problem  of  illusion  may  very  well  turn  out 
to  be  the  central  problem  of  art.  The  neo-classical 
theorist  affected  unduly  the  rational  element  in  art, 
and  allowed  as  little  as  he  could  for  the  immeasur- 
able potentialities  of  illusion.  The  romanticists  have 
given  us  plenty  of  illusion,  but  illusion  divorced  ' 
from  rational  purpose,  and  only  too  often  a  false 
illusion  of  the  flesh.  Rousseau,  as  we  have  seen,  was 
ready  to  take  flight  from  the  real  world  into  a  world 
of  pure  illusion,  but  his  dream-world  as  he  describes 
[  103] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

it  is  in  some  ways  only  too  reminiscent  of  the  earth. 
He  surrounds  himself  in  his  pays  des  chimeres  with 
a  "  seraglio  of  houris,"  and  these  voluptuous  visions 
bear  the  features  of  women  he  has  actually  known. 
His  "blood  takes  fire  "  at  all  this  impassioned  recol- 
lection. We  evidently  have  here  the  very  opposite 
of  what  Bacon  desires.  Rousseau's  imagination  has 
contracted  a  confederacy  with  his  affections  against 
the  reason,  and  throws  its  golden  glamour  not  only 
over  present  but  also  over  past  sensation,  —  a  refine- 
ment that  scarcely  entered  into  Bacon's  reckoning. 
Rousseau  indeed  perfected  the  Epicureanism  that 
consists  in  intensifying  and  prolonging  enjoyment 
by  revery.  If  he  can  thus  fuse  soul  and  sense  he 
is  careless  of  the  "future  and  sum  of  time."  Rous- 
seau himself  speaks  of  "  covering  with  a  delicious 
veil  the  aberrations  of  the  senses  "  ; '  and  in  the 
very  passage  where  Byron  calls  Rousseau  a  lover  of 
kleal  Beauty  he  writes  that 

he  knew 
How  to  make  madness  beautiful,  and  threw 
O'er  erring  thoughts  and  deeds  a  heavenly  hue. 

This  use  of  imaginative  illusion  in  making  madness 

'  Nouvelle  Hclo'ise,  i*  partie,  lettre  1. 
[  104] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

beautiful  would,  if  traced  down,  bring  us  at  last  to 
what  has  been  termed  the  phosphorescent  slime  of 
some  of  our  modern  decadents.  The  art  of  giving  a 
heavenly  hue  to  materialistic  impulse  assumes  many 
aspects  in  the  sham  idealisms  and  pseudo-spirituali- 
ties of  the  nineteenth  century  ;  we  have  "  mystical" 
and  "Platonic"  raptures  that  land  one  at  last  in  a 
mire  of  sensuality ;  effusions  of  fine  sentiments  about 
brotherly  love  that  are  only  a  specious  mask  for  envy 
and  hatred  of  riches  and  success  ;  "new  thought  " 
that  is  so  lofty  as  to  deny  even  the  existence  of 
matter  and  yet  turns  out  somehow  to  be  interested 
only  in  the  preservation  of  physical  health,  etc. 

But  to  return  to  the  literary  and  artistic  problem. 
The  tendency  I  have  just  been  describing  seems 
a  rather  strange  concomitant  of  Rousseau's  theory 
of  the  primitive  and  the  childlike,  yet  such  in  nearly 
every  case  it  can  be  shown  to  be.  The  breaking 
down  of  all  barriers  and  boundaries  in  order  to 
achieve  the  emotional  and  instinctive  unity  that 
the  child  enjoys,  and  that  primitive  man  is  supposed 
to  have  enjoyed,  always  results  in  a  certain  mingling 
of  the  flesh  and  spirit  though  it  may  not  always  go 
so  far  as  what  the  Germans  expressively  but  dis- 
[105] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

agreeably  call  priapism  of  the  soul.  The  art  that  is 
content  to  guard  its  own  boundaries,  the  Rousseau- 
ist  would  say,  is  still  caught  in  a  hard  formalism,  and 
has  not  yet  felt  the  expansive  power  of  the  primal 
love.  Possibly  this  whole  side  of  romanticism  finds 
its  best  expression  in  Richard  Wagner  and  his 
theory  of  the  music-drama.  According  to  Wagner 
pure  music  and  pure  poetry,  that  is  music  and  poetry 
that  keep  each  within  its  own  confines,  are  alike  un- 
availing. They  become  effective  only  when  they  are 
rid  of  an  unprofitable  restraint  and  self-limitation 
and  melt  together  in  a  mystical  erotic  embrace. 
Poetry  freed  from  clogging  intellectualism  "  sinks 
down  with  his  bride  (Music)  and  learns  the  hidden 
wonders  of  the  deep,"  "  knows  the  Unconscious,  the 
Instinctive,  the  Purely-human,"  and  at  last  becomes 
truly  creative.'  "The  offspring  of  this  marriage  of 
Poetry  with  Music,  of  word-speech  and  tone-speech, 
the  embodied  love-moment  of  both  arts  "  is  verse- 
melody  ;  ^  and  this  supreme  fruit  of  the  union  of 
Music  and  Poetry  is  only  a  return  to  the  primitive 

'  See    Ellis's    translation   of    Wagner's   prose   works,   vol.  ii 
{Opera  and  Drama),  pp.  20I,  286,  352,  353,  356. 
""  Jbid.,  p.  313. 

[   106  ] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

kinship  of  the  two  arts,  a  recovery  of  the  primitive 
melody  {Urmelodie).^ 

In  short,  nothing  could  be  conceived  more  Rous-     ^ 
seauistic  than  Wagner's  theory  of  opera.   It  is  Rous-    ^ 
seauistic  not  only  in  the  general  conception  that  men 
are  to  meet,  not  in  a  common  discipline  but  a  com- 
mon sympathy,  that  love  is  to  triumph  over  restraint,     1 
and  that  in  so  far  as  men  attain  this  emotional  union     f 
they  are  merely  reverting  to  a  pristine  felicity  :  it  is 
Rousseauistic  also  in  the  specific  application  of  this 
conception  to  music.   According  to  Rousseau,  Ian-  -7^ 
guage   and    music  were  primitively  one,  and  this'-  • 
primitive  speech-song  was  at  the  same  time  poetry.^ 
The  period  of  the  unconscious,  of  confused  emotional 
unity,  is  to  be  preferred  to  the  period  of  clear  and 
conscious  intellectual  distinctions.   Like  Rousseau 
and  Wordsworth,  Wagner  is  pervaded  by  the  fear 
of  the  meddling  intellect  as  being  fatal  to  spontaneity. 

*  Opera  ajid  Drama,  pp.  282,  293. 

*  See  Essai  sur  VOrigine  des  langues,  Rousseau  has  even  anti- 
cipated in  this  essay  Wagner's  attempt  to  foist  primitivism  upon 
the  Greeks.  I  am  not  claiming  a  direct  influence  of  Rousseau 
upon  Wagner.  One  intermediary  between  Rousseau  and  Wagner 
was  E.  T.  A.  Hoffmann  (cf.  Oxford  History  of  Music,  vol.  vi, 
pp.  351,  352).   For  Hoffmann  and  Rousseau,  see  p.  176, 

[107] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

But  we  should  already  know  what  to  think  of  the 
claims  of  such  a  point  of  view  to  be  either  mystical 
or  Platonic.  The  higher  unity  and  spontaneity  of  the 
Platonist  is  associated,  as  I  have  already  said,  with  a 
concentration  of  the  will,  with  a  sense  of  awe,  and 
elevation,  and  restraint,  and  not  with  either  an  expan- 
sion or  a  titillation  of  the  sensibility.  The  Platonist 
does  not  confound  the  planes  of  being,  and  in  par- 
ticular is  open  to  the  charge  of  separating  too  sharply 
rather  than  of  running  together  the  planes  of  flesh 
and  spirit.  Goethe,  who  in  spite  of  Napoleon's  re- 
mark frequently  shows  himself  a  partisan  of  the 
genre  tranchi^  says  that  there  are  but  two  legitimate 
kinds  of  music,  the  kind  that  impels  one  to  dance 
and  the  kind  that  inspires  one  to  pray.  What  the 
modern  symbolists  and  decadents  have  admired  in 
Wagner  on  the  other  hand  is  a  mixture  of  the  sacred 
and  profane  elements,  —  what  one  of  them  has 
termed  a  "  voluptuous  religiosity." 

Hitherto  in  this  chapter  I  have  been  striving  to 
distinguish  between  the  Platonic  as  opposed  to  what 
I  have  variously  called  the  pseudo-Platonic  or  Rous- 
seauistic  or  romantic  point  of  view.  My  use  of  the 
word  romantic  has  doubtless  caused  irritation.  It 
[io8] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

requires  courage  in  any  one  who  aspires  to  be 
looked  on  as  a  careful  thinker  to  use  the  word  at  all. 
Some  one  indeed  has  suggested  that  it  would  be 
a  philanthropic  undertaking  ta  found  a  society  for 
suppressing  the  word  romantic  entirely ;  a  still  more 
philanthropic  undertaking,  in  my  opinion,  would  be 
to  found  a  society  for  its  more  accurate  definition. 
The  confusion  that  has  grown  up  about  the  word  is 
largely  to  be  ascribed  to  the  romanticists  themselves 
and  their  dislike  of  the  "  false  secondary  power  by 
which  we  multiply  distinctions."  To  abolish  the 
word  altogether  would  indeed  be  about  as  intelligent 
as  to  abolish  the  general  denomination  "bird"  be- 
cause of  certain  differences  that  exist  between,  let 
us  say,  an  ostrich  and  a  wren.  Now  I  not  only 
would  admit  that  certain  varieties  of  romanticists 
are  at  least  as  different  from  other  varieties  as  an 
ostrich  from  a  wren,  but  actually  need  to  insist  on 
some  of  these  differences  in  the  interest  of  my  pre- 
sent subject. 

But  before  coming  to  the  traits  by  which  roman- 
ticists differ,  we  may  appropriately  ask  what  is  the 
trait  they  all  have   in  common.    An  Aristotelian 
would  reply  that  this  common  trait  is  a  love  of  the 
[  109] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

wonderful  rather  than  the  probable.  A  craving  for 
the  marvelous,  for  adventure  and  surprise,  exists, 
as  Aristotle  says,  to  some  extent  in  all  men.  A 
man's  temper  grows  romantic  in  proportion  as  he  is 
interested  in  the  marvelous,  in  adventure  and  sur- 
prise, rather  than  in  tracing  cause  and  effect.  The 
man  of  the  Middle  Ages  was  often  romantic  in  this 
sense :  he  was  haunted  by  the  idea  of  adventure,  the 
rare  and  unusual  event.  In  its  extreme  form  this 
pursuit  of  adventure  resulted  in  something  similar 
to  what  we  have  in  Don  Quixote,  in  an  actual  clash 
between  the  logic  of  dreamland  and  the  logic  of 
every-day  fact. 

Whenever  the  love  of  adventure  is  keen,  and  the 
analytical  and  logical  faculties  are  either  dormant 
or  occupied  elsewhere,  art  may  very  well  come 
to  be  looked  on  as  a  pleasant  vagabondage,  rather 
than  as  a  working  toward  a  definite  goal "  in  ac- 
cordance," as  Aristotle  would  say,  "  with  probability 
or  necessity."  And  in  direct  proportion  as  men  look 
on  art  in  this  way,  they  are  likely  to  be  indifferent 
to  the  clearly  defined  type ;  in  the  drama,  for  ex- 
ample, they  are  likely  to  be  tolerant  of  more  mixtures 
than  those  enumerated  by  Polonius,  —  "  tragedy 
[no] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

comedy,  pastoral-comical,  historical-pastoral,  tragi- 
cal -  historical,  tragical  -  comical  -  historical  -  pastoral," 
etc.  Now  the  English  have  always  been  imaginative 
rather  than  formal  or  logical  in  their  art  and  litera- 
ture, and  this  is  no  doubt  one  reason  why  the  Eng- 
lish, as  compared  with  the  Greeks  or  French,  have 
been  careless  of  the  genre  U'anche. 

Plainly,  however,  this  indifference  to  the  clearly 
defined  type  is  something  very  different  from  the 
mixtures  and  confusions  we  find  in  that  side  of  the 
romantic  movement  associated  with  Rousseau.  In- 
deed, this  Rousseauistic  romanticism  is  in  some 
respects  so  distinct  from  other  varieties  that  we  may 
partially  sympathize  with  those  who  regret  that  it 
could  not  have  received  another  name.  The  Rous- 
seauist  resembles  other  romanticists  in  being  adven- 
turous rather  than  purposeful ;  but  his  adventure, 
his  thirst  for  novelty,  for  the  thrill  of  wonder  and 
surprise,  has  assumed  a  new  form  :  it  is  not  so  much 
a  quest  or  a  dreaming  of  the  rare  and  unusual 
event  as  of  the  rare  and  unusual  sensation;  it 
is  less  an  attitude  of  the  spirit  than  a  state  of 
the  sensibility,  or  rather  the  spirit  itself  is  so  used 
as  to  throw  its  halo  over  the  impressions  of  sense, 
[III] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

invest  them  with  imaginative  illusion,  and  give  them 
a  sort  of  infinite  reverberation.  Baudelaire  says  that 
he  attains  through  odors  the  feeling  of  infinitude 
that  others  attain  through  the  suggestive  power  of 
sound.   His  soul  "  swims  "  '  on  perfumes. 

But  we  have  already  spoken  of  this  art  of  min- 
gling flesh  and  spirit  in  revery.  Whatever  else  may 
be  thought  of  it,  it  has  certainly  enriched  and  deep- 
ened the  life  of  the  senses.  But  the  danger  of  the 
art  is  already  visible  in  its  first  great  adept.  Hume 
writes  of  Rousseau:  "  He  has  only  felt  during  the 
whole  course  of  his  life  ;  and  in  this  respect  his  sen- 
sibility rises  to  a  pitch  beyond  what  I  have  seen  any 
example  of :  but  it  still  gives  him  a  more  acute  feel- 
ing of  pain  than  of  pleasure.  He  is  like  a  man  who 
were  stript  not  only  of  his  clothes,  but  of  his  skin, 
and  turned  out  in  that  situation  to  combat  with  the 
rude  and  boisterous  elements."  * 

This  almost  pathological  keenness  of  sensation, 
this  hypera^sthesia  as  it  may  be  termed,  is,  if  we 
may  judge  from  the  confessions  of  many  who  have 
possessed  it,  a  somewhat  doubtful  gift  of  the  gods. 

*  Cf.  Shelley's  Alastor  :  "  Soul-dissolving  perfumes." 

•  Letter  to  Dr.  Blair,  25  March,  1766. 

[112] 


PLATONISTS  AND  PSEUDO-PLATONISTS 

At  any  rate,  it  marks  off  its  possessors  from  the 
other  types  of  romanticist.  Keats,  for  example,  is 
sometimes  spoken  of  as  an  EUzabethan  born  out  of 
due  season  ;  but  Keats  regrets  his  "  horrid  morbid- 
ity of  temperament," '  and  I  for  one  do  not  believe 
that  the  Elizabethans  suffered  from  morbidity  ^  of 
just  that  kind.  The  great  romanticists  of  that  age 
were  not,  like  so  many  of  this  modern  brand,  mere 
human  sensitive-plants,  recoiling  from  the  rough 
and  tumble  of  the  world.  They  were  not,  as  Cole- 
ridge complains  of  himself,  "beset  with  the  most 
wretched  and  unmanning  reluctance  and  shrinking 
from  action."  They  were  interested  in  actual  ad- 
venture, caring  little  for  the  mysterious  dalliance  of 
soul  and  sense  in  the  tower  of  ivory. 

The  modern  school,  on  the  other  hand,  is  often 
more  interested  in  this  dalliance  than  it  is  in  action 
of  either  the  romantic  or  classical  types,  —  in  other 

'  I  do  not  mean  to  disparage  Keats  by  what  I  say  about  him 
here  and  elsewhere.  I  believe  he  had  a  vein  of  essential  manli- 
ness that  was  a  counterpoise  to  the  "  horrid  morbidity."  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  the  Rousseauistic  temperament  was  far  more 
marked  in  Shelley  than  in  Keats. 

*  Of  course  some  of  the  later  Elizabethans  (e.  g.,  Ford)  suffered 
from  their  own  type  of  morbidity. 

[113] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

words,  in  action  that  is  either  primarily  adventurous 
or  primarily  purposeful.  The  highest  literary  and 
artistic  ambition  of  the  school  is  not  so  much  to 
paint  action  as  to  suggest  revery.  We  have  tried 
to  show  that  this  revery  is  a  product  of  the  prirai- 
tivism  of  Rousseau,  of  his  attempt  to  revive  the 
child-like  and  the  spontaneous  by  a  return  to  "  na- 
ture," and  that  in  any  case  it  should  not  be  re- 
garded as  either  Platonic  or  mystical.  After  all 
these  preliminary  explanations  and  definitions  we 
should  now  be  prepared  to  enter  the  romantic  pal- 
ace of  dreams  and  to  make  a  closer  study  of  the  magic 
secrets  of  suggestiveness  that  have  been  practiced 
by  its  occupants  during  the  past  century. 


CHAPTER  VI 
SUGGESTIVENESS    IN    ROMANTIC    ART 

I.    WORD-PAINTING 

According  to  neo-classicjheory,  as  we  have  seen,  the 
poet  is  to  be  a  painter  of  things  outside  himself, — 
in  other  words,  he  is  to  be  purely  objective.  Homer, 
says  Aristotle,  does  not  entertain  us  with  his  own 
person,  but  is  more  than  any  other  poet  an  imitator. 
Now  if  the  poet  is  thus  to  imitate  the  outer  world 
he  must  have  wide  knowledge  of  it.  "  The  sover- 
eign poem  "  (i.  e.,  the  epic),  says  Muzio,'  "  is  a  paint- 
ing of  the  universe "  ;  and  the  epic  poet  should 
therefore  be  universal.  According  to  the  romanti- 
cist, on  the  other  hand,  all  that  the  poet,  even  the 
epic  poet,  needs  to  possess  is  feeling.  What,  for  ex- 
ample, was  Lamartine's  equipment  for  writing  epics .? 
We  may  infer  from  the  verse  of  Sainte-Beuve : 

Lamartine  ignorant  qui  ne  salt  que  son  &me,  — 
and  "  soul "  in  romantic  parlance  we  should  remem- 

'  Arte poetica  (Venice,  1551). 
[115] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

ber  is  about  synonymous  with  a  gush  of  sensi- 
bihty. 

The  theory  that  would  divert  the  poet  from  him- 
self, and  make  of  him  a  painter  of  human  actions, 
has  its  advantages,  especially  for  such  forms  as  the 
drama  or  epic.  There  are  evident  dangers  in  taking 
the  next  step  and  dealing  in  this  detached  and  ob- 
jective way  with  words,  in  looking  on  them  merely 
as  the  colors  with  which  the  poet  paints  his  pic- 
tures. Lessing,  who  refuted  the  confusion  that 
had  arisen  from  this  assimilation  of  words  to  colors, 
does  not  himself  escape  the  charge  of  treating 
words  too  objectively.  Words  do  indeed  follow  one 
another  in  time,  but  not  in  quite  so  inert  and  pas- 
sive a  way  as  Lessing's  theory  seems  to  imply ;  or, 
rather,  they  are  inert  and  passive  only  in  proportion 
as  they  are  employed  unimaginatively.  But  imagi- 
nation may  transform  them,  play  about  them  like  a 
lambent  flame,'  and  infuse  into  them  a  new  and  active 
potency.  Only  three  years  after  the  publication  of 
the  "  Laokoon,"  Herder  pointed  out  the  inadequacy 
of  Lessing's  way  of  looking  on  words.    Herder's 

'  Cf.  Joubert :  "  Les  mots  s'illuminent  quand  le  doigt  du  poete 
y  fait  passer  son  phosphore." 

[ii6] 


WORD-PAINTING 

point  of  view  is  what  we  should  call  distinctively 
romantic.  "The  essence  of  poetry,"  says  Herder, 
"  is  in  the  power  that  cleaves  to  words,  a  magic 
power  that  works  upon  my  soul  through  fantasy 
and  recollection."  '  And  he  regrets  that  Lessing  has 
not  put  "  working  on  our  souls  or  energy,"  ^  at  the 
very  centre  of  poetry,  in  contrasting  it  with  paint- 
ing. He  had  learned  especially  from  Homer,  Her- 
der continues,  that  poetry  does  not  act  upon  the 
ear  through  a  mere  succession  of  sounds,  but  ener- 
gizes and  stimulates  into  synthetic  activity  the  in- 
ner powers  of  the  spirit,  above  all,  the  imagination. 
Herder,  in  short,  makes  a  plea  for  what  we  should 
call  suggestiveness. 

In  his  praise  of  Homer,  Herder  may  have  been 
influenced  by  a  work  that  exercised  also  an  impor- 
tant influence  on  Lessing, — Diderot's  "  Letter  on 
the  Deaf  and  Dumb"  (175 1).  This  work  of  Dide- 
rot's is  the  kind  one  might  expect  from  a  man  who 
lived  at  the  "mercy  of  his  diaphragm."  There  is 
a  profuse  but  somewhat  turbid  flow  of  ideas.  We 
seem  to  be  listening  to  several  men  each  presenting 
a  different  point  of  view;  at  one  moment  to  an 

'  Erstes  krit.  Wdldchen  (ed.  Suphan),  p.  139.      ^  Ibid.,  p.  157. 
[117] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

admirer  of  Father  Castel '  and  his  color-clavichord ; 
at  another  to  a  keen  analyst  who  is  striving  to  set 
objective  bounds  to  the  arts  ;  still  again  to  a  ro- 
manticist who  is  interested  rather  in  the  way  the 
arts  may  run  together  emotionally.  Lessing  has 
turned  to  account  the  keenly  analytical  passages 
and  neglected  the  rest.  This  is  worth  noting  be- 
cause the  Germans  in  general  have  greatly  exag- 
gerated the  kinship  between  Diderot  and  Lessing. 
The  prevailing  point  of  view  in  Lessing,  as  I  have 
already  said,  is  humanistic,  in  Diderot,  naturalistic 
and  humanitarian.  Diderot  is  already  on  his  way  to 
all  the  confusions  of  humanistic  values  to  which 
naturalism  in  either  its  scientific  or  sentimental 
form  has  given  rise.  Both  as  a  scientist  and  as  an 
impressionist,  Diderot  is  interested  in  the  mysteri- 
ous intercommunication  of  the  senses  in  the  depths 
of  individual  feeling.  He  asks  of  one  person :  "  Had 
there  grown  up  in  the  long  run  a  sort  of  correspond- 
ence between  two  different  senses  ? "  ^  He  says  that 
the  blind  professor  of  Mathematics,  Saunderson, 
voyait  par  la  peaiiJ-    He  mentions  another  blind  per- 

*  (Euvres  de  Diderot  (fid.  Assezat),  I,  p.  356. 

*  Ibid.,  p.  339.  3  Jbid.,  p.  306. 

[118] 


WORD-PAINTING 

son  who  could  tell  the  colors  of  different  cloths  by 
the  touch/  still  another  who  distinguished  the  sound 
of  voices  as  "blond  or  brunette."  ^  Diderot's  own 
impressionism  arises  from  an  emotional  unrestraint 
that  spurns  all  boundaries.  "The  very  essence  of 
Diderot's  criticism  and  of  his  whole  understanding 
of  art,"  says  M.  Faguet,  "  is  the  confusion  of  the 
getires.  ...  If  inclined  to  be  a  bit  malicious  one- 
might  say  he  was  a  good  dramatic  critic  in  the  Salon 
and  a  good  art  critic  in  dealing  with  the  drama."  ^ 

And  M.  Faguet  goes  on  to  praise  Diderot  and  point 
out  the  strength  as  well  as  the  weakness  of  his; 
method.  But  both  his  strength  and  his  weakness  are 
equally  remote  from  the  strength  and  weakness  of 
Lessing.  Indeed,  in  the  very  pages  that  have  fur- 
nished such  important  hints  to  Lessing,  especially 
as  to  the  importance  of  choosing  the  right  moment 
in  plastic  art,  Diderot  discusses  Homer  in  a  way 
that  anticipates  not  Lessing  but  Herder.  Diderot 
is  struck  by  the  magic  power  that  Homer  and  other 
great  poets  can  confer  on  the  slightest  words  and 
phrases  so  that  they  reverberate  in  the  depths  of  our 

'   (Euvres  de  Diderot  (fid.  Assezat),  I,  p.  332.      ^  Ibid.,  p.  334. 
^  Article  "  Diderot "  in  his  Dix-Huitilme  Slide. 

[II9I 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

sensibility.  He  is  interested  in  Homer  not  as  a  por- 
trayer  of  actions  but  as  a  suggester  of  images.  He 
proclaims  that,  though  poetry  cannot  paint  to  the 
eye,  it  can  and  must,  if  it  is  to  rise  above  prose, 
paint  to  the  imagination.  You  may,  he  says,  have 
clearness,  purity,  precision ;  you  may  show  taste  in 
your  choice  of  words  and  in  the  careful  rounding  of 
your  periods, — with  all  this  you  will  have  attained 
a  good  prose  style,  but  still  remain  far  short  of 
poetry.  "  There  passes  into  the  speech  of  the  poet 
a  spirit  that  moves  and  vivifies  its  every  syllable. 
What  is  this  spirit  ?  I  have  sometimes  felt  its  pre- 
sence, but  all  I  know  about  it  is  that  through  it 
things  are  at  once  spoken  and  pictured ;  that  at  the 
same  time  that  the  understanding  grasps  them,  the 
soul  is  moved  by  them,  the  imagination  sees  them, 
the  ear  hears  them,  and  discourse  is  no  longer  a  link- 
ing together  of  vigorous  phrases  that  set  forth  the 
thought  nobly  and  forcibly,  but  a  tissue  of  closely 
crowded  hieroglyphs  that  paint  it.  I  might  say  that 
in  this  sense  all  poetry  is  emblematic."  '  (Nowadays 
we  should  say  symbolical.) 

This  is  that  true  poetical  painting  which  Lcssing 
«  op.  cit.,  p.  374. 
[  120] 


I 


WORD-PAINTING 

would  probably  not  have  denied,  but  of  which  he  has 
certainly  said  very  little  in  the  "  Laokoon."  Homer 
especially  is  praised  by  Diderot  for  the  number  of 
words  and  phrases  of  magic  suggestiveness  that  he 
contains,  —  words  and  phrases  that  are  a  "  hiero- 
glyphic painting,"  that  is,  painting  not  to  the  eye 
but  "  to  the  imagination."  '  Diderot  admits  that  this 
art  of  painting  to  the  imagination  is  infinitely  difficult : 
the  hieroglyphs  acquire  their  suggestiveness,  as  he 
surmises,  through  certain  subtle  combinations  of  long 
and  short  syllables  in  Greek  and  Latin  and  through 
certain  collocations  of  vowels  and  consonants  in  the 
modern  languages.  These  hieroglyphs  (and  there- 
fore true  poetry)  are  nearly  always  untranslatable. 
They  require  in  the  person  who  feels  them  some- 
thing of  the  same  poetical  spirit  that  inspired  them ; 
to  the  unpoetical  they  are  meaningless. 

An  interesting  comparison  may  be  made  between 
Diderot's  theory  of  suggestive  word-painting  in 
poetry  and  the  theory  of  suggestiveness  in  a  treatise 
of  Rousseau's  I  have  already  mentioned,  —  the 
"Essay  on  the  Origin  of  Language."^   This  work 

'  CEuvres  de  Diderot  (Ed.  Assezat),  I,  p.  377. 
*  The  exact  date  of  the  composition  of  this  work  is  uncertain 
[121] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

is  perhaps  less  rich  in  ideas  than  Diderot's  "  Let- 
ter on  the  Deaf  and  Dumb,"  but  it  is  also  less 
confused.  In  the  act  of  composition  at  least  Rous, 
seau  did  not  live  at  the  "  mercy  of  his  diaphragm." 
In  short,  he  is  a  great  writer  and  not  merely 
an  improviser  of  genius.  Now  in  this  particular 
essay  Rousseau  divides  as  with  a  knife  the  old 
from  the  new.  He  repudiates  the  pseudo-classical 
efforts  to  get  with  one  art  the  effects  of  another, 
and  at  the  same  time  indicates  the  true  means  by 
which  this  double  effect  may  be  attained.  The  arts 
should  not  be  blended  outwardly  and  formally  as 
Father  Castel  had  done  in  his  effort  to  paint  music, 
but  they  may  be  blended  emotionally.  In  attacking 
Castel,  Rousseau  anticipates  the  central  generaliza- 
tion of  the  "  Laokoon."  "I  have  seen,"'  he  says, 
"  that  famous  clavichord  on  which,  as  it  was  claimed, 
music  was  produced  with  colors.  But  a  man  shows  a 
very  poor  knowledge  of  the  workings  of  natural  law 
who  docs  not  perceive  that  colors  are  effective  in 
virtue  of  their  permanence  and  sounds  through  their 

though  scarcely  later  than  1754.  It  circulated  more  or  less  in 
manuscript,  but  was  not  actually  published  until  1781. 

'  For  Rousseau's  personal  relations  with  Castel,  see  Confessions^ 
livre  vii  (1742). 

[  122] 


WORD-PAINTING 

successiveness.  .  .  .  Thus  every  sense  has  its  own 
peculiar  field.  The  field  of  music  is  time,  that  of 
painting,  space.  To  multiply  simultaneous  sounds, 
or  to  make  colors  follow  one  another  in  single  file, 
is  to  change  their  economy,  is  to  put  the  eye  in 
the  place  of  the  ear  and  the  ear  in  the  place  of  the 
eye,"  etc. 

The  pictures  that  music  cannot  paint  directly  it 
can  however  paint  suggestively.  "  One  of  the  great 
advantages  of  the  musician,"  says  Rousseau,  "  is  to 
be  able  to  paint  things  that  are  inaudible,  whereas 
it  is  impossible  for  the  painter  to  depict  things  that 
are  invisible.'  And  the  greatest  miracle  of  an  art 
that  acts  only  through  movement  is  its  power  to 
present  images  of  everything,  even  the  image  of 
repose.  Sleep,  the  calm  of  night,  solitude,  silence 
itself,  enter  into  the  pictures  of  music."  Music, 
Rousseau  goes  on  to  say,  achieves  these  paintings, 
"by  arousing  through  one  sense  emotions  similar  to 
those  that  are  aroused  by  another,  ...  by  substi- 
tuting for  the  inanimate  image  of   an  object  the 

'  Rousseau,  of  course,  very  much  underestimates,  from  our 
modern  point  of  view,  the  suggestive  power  of  painting.  See 
Walter  Pater's  essay  on  "  Giorgione,"  and  the  passage  from  Haz' 
litt  quoted  later. 

[  123  ] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

emotions  that  its  actual  image  stirs  in  the  heart  of 
the  beholder.  Music  can  render  not  merely  the  agi- 
tation of  the  sea,  the  roaring  of  flames  in  a  confla- 
gration, the  flowing  of  brooks,  the  falling  of  rain,  or 
swollen  torrents ;  but  it  can  paint  the  horror  of  a 
frightful  desert,  darken  the  walls  of  a  dungeon, 
quiet  the  tempest,  make  the  air  clear  and  calm,  and 
diffuse  from  the  orchestra  a  new  freshness  over  the 
groves.  It  does  not  represent  these  objects  directly, 
but  awakens  in  the  soul  the  same  sentiments  we 
experience  on  seeing  them." 

The  theory  of  suggestiveness  is  already  fairly 
complete  in  such  passages  as  those  I  have  just  been 
quoting  from  Rousseau  and  Diderot.  Like  Diderot 
and  Rousseau,  and  unlike  Lessing,  the  romantic 
critics  are  going  to  be  less  interested  in  the  analyti- 
cal and  formal  bounding  and  delimiting  of  the  arts 
than  in  the  new  synthesis,  —  in  the  way  the  arts 
may  melt  together  and  interpenetrate  in  emotion. 
The  following  passage  from  the  "Athenaum"  is 
typical  for  Germany:  "We  should  once  more  try  to 
bring  the  arts  closer  together  and  seek  for  transi- 
tions from  one  to  the  other.  Statues  perhaps  may 
quicken  into  pictures,  pictures  become  poems,  poems 
[124] 


I 


WORD-PAINTING 

music,  and  (who  knows?)  in  like  manner  stately 
church  music  may  once  more  rise  heavenward  as  a 
cathedral."  ' 

In  England  Coleridge  and  Hazlitt  write  very 
much  to  the  purpose  on  suggestiveness,  though  in 
substance  they  do  not  go  much  beyond  Rousseau 
and  Diderot.  Coleridge  begins  by  repudiating  the 
kind  of  word-painting  that  Lessing  has  condemned 
in  the  "  Laokoon."  "  The  presence  of  genius,"  he 
says,  "  is  not  shown  in  elaborating  a  picture :  we 
have  had  many  specimens  of  this  sort  of  work  in 
modern  poems,  where  all  is  so  dutchified,  if  I  may 
use  the  word,  by  the  most  minute  touches,  that  the 

'  A.  W.  Schlegel :  "  Die  Gemahlde  "  {Athenaum,  Zweiter  Band, 
pp.  49,  50).  Diderot's  influence  on  Schlegel  is  marked  in  many  of 
the  Fragmente,  for  example  in  the  following  :  "  Im  Styl  des  achten 
Dichters  ist  nichts  Schmuck,  alles  nothwendige  Hieroglyphe." 
"  Die  Poesie  ist  Musik  fiir  das  innere  Ohr,  und  Mahlerey  fiir  das 
innere  Auge  ;  aber  gedampfte  Musik,  aber  verschwebende  Mahle- 
rey." —  "Mancher  betrachtet  Gemahlde  am  liebsten  mit  verschloss- 
nen  Augen,  damit  die  Fantasie  nicht  gestort  werde."  [IbiJ.,  Ersten 
Bandes,  Zweites  Stiick,  p.  45.)  Schlegel  would  no  doubt  have 
preferred  to  the  actual  picture  Diderot's  musically  suggestive 
description  of  it :  "  Hierin  ist  Diderot  Meister.  Er  musizirt  viele 
Gemahlde  wie  der  Abt  Vogler."  And  again  :  "  Sich  eine  Gemahl- 
deaustellung  von  einem  Diderot  beschreiben  lassen,  ist  ein  wahr- 
haft  kaiserlicher  Luxus."  {Ibid.,  pp.  46,  47.) 

[125] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

reader  naturally  asks  why  words,  and  not  painting, 
are  used.  .  .  .  The  power  of  poetry  is,  by  a  single 
word,  perhaps,  to  instil  energy  into  the  mind,  which 
compels  the  imagination  to  produce  the  picture. 
Prospero  tells  Miranda, — 

One  midnight, 
Fated  to  the  purpose,  did  Antonio  open 
The  gates  of  Milan  ;  and  i'  the  dead  of  darkness, 
The  ministers  for  the  purpose  hurried  thence 
Me,  and  thy  crying  self. 

Here,  by  introducing  a  single  happy  epithet,  'crying,* 
in  the  last  line,  a  complete  picture  is  presented  to 
the  mind,  and  in  the  production  of  such  pictures 
the  power  of  genius  consists."  '  Elsewhere  he  con- 
nects his  theory  of  suggestive  word-painting  with 
his  distinction  between  the  imagination  and  fancy. 
"The  poet,"  he  says, "  should  paint  to  the  imagination 
not  to  the  fancy,  and  I  know  no  happier  case  to  ex- 
emplify the  distinction  between  these  two  faculties." 
After  citing  an  example  of  the  former  mode  of  poetic 
painting  from  Milton  he  adds:  "This  is  creation 
rather  than  painting,  or  if  painting,  yet  such,  and 
with  such  co-presence  of  the  whole  picture  flashed  at 

'  Lectures  on  Shakespeare  (Bohn  Edition),  p.  138. 
[126] 


f 


WORD-PAINTING 

once  upon  the  eye,  as  the  sun  paints  in  a  camera 
obscura.  But  the  poet  must  Hkewise  understand  and 
command  what  Bacon  calls  the  vestigia  connminia 
of  the  senses,  the  latency  of  all  in  each,  and  more 
especially  as  by  a  magical  penna  duplex^  the  excite- 
ment of  vision  by  sound  and  the  exponents  of 
sound," '  etc. 

Hazlitt  arrives  at  conclusions  very  similar  to 
those  of  Coleridge  in  his  essay  on  "  Gusto,"  though 
he  applies  them  especially  to  painting.  Hazlitt  sums 
up  in  the  word  gusto  what  we  should  variously  call 
vitality,  expj^ession,  suggestiveness.  Gusto  is  the 
"inner  principle,"  the  living  passion,  the  subtle 
pervading  power  that  overleaps  all  formal  barriers 
and  acts  synthetically  on  the  senses  and  imagination 
of  the  beholder.  In  landscape-painting,  as  appears 
from  a  passage  I  have  already  quoted,^  the  synthesis 
is  between  man  and  outer  nature.  "  In  a  word," 
says  Hazlitt  in  language  closely  parallel  to  that  of 
Rousseau,  "gusto  in  painting  is  where  the  impres- 
sions made  on  one  sense  excite  by  affinity  those  of 
another."  However,  in  attributing  so  much  sugges- 
tiveness, even  musical  suggestiveness,  to  painting, 

'  Biographia  Literaria,  ch.  xxii.  *  See  pp.  97,  98. 

[127] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

Hazlitt  goes  beyond  Rousseau.  For  example,  he 
writes  that  "  Titian's  landscapes  have  a  prodigious 
gusto  both  in  the  coloring  and  forms.  We  shall  never 
forget  one  that  we  saw  many  years  ago  in  the  Or- 
leans Gallery  of  Actseon  hunting.  It  had  a  brown, 
mellow,  autumnal  look.  The  sky  was  of  the  color  of 
stone.  The  winds  seemed  to  sing  through  the  rus- 
tling branches  of  the  trees,  and  already  you  might 
hear  the  twanging  of  bows  resound  through  the 
tangled  mazes  of  the  wood."  Of  Claude's  landscapes 
Hazlitt  complains  that  "  they  give  more  of  nature  as 
cognizable  by  one  sense  alone  [than  those  of  any 
other  painter,  but]  they  do  not  interpret  one  sense 
by  another  ;  .  .  .  that  is,  his  eye  wanted  imagination, 
it  did  not  strongly  sympathize  with  his  other  fac- 
ulties. He  saw  the  landscape  but  he  did  not  feel 
it,"  etc. 

In  this  passage  Hazlitt  is  estimating  Claude,  not 
objectively  by  his  intellectual  breadth  and  excellent 
design,  but  from  the  point  of  view  of  a  certain 
subtle  emotional  appeal.  Under  this  romantic  in- 
fluence the  artist  comes  to  be  chiefly  esteemed,  not 
for  the  careful  and  coherent  working  out  of  a  rational 
whole,  but  for  his  power  to  enthrall  the  individual 
V  [128] 


WORD-PAINTING 

sensibility.  Instead  of  being  an  imitator  in  the  Aris- 
totelian sense  he  becomes  a  "  weaver  of  magic  and 
spells."  Art  and  literature  pass  more  and  more 
from  the  domain  of  action  into  the  region  of  revery. 
Art  is  reduced  to  suggestion,  and  suggestion  is 
defined  as  an  "attenuated  hypnosis." '  In  the  words 
of  M.  Bergson  :  "Art  aims  to  lull  to  sleep  the  active 
powers  of  our  personality  and  bring  us  to  a  state  of 
perfect  docility  in  which  we  realize  the  idea  that  is. 
suggested  to  us,  in  which  we  sympathize  with  the 
sentiment  expressed.  In  the  methods  of  art  we  find 
under  a  refined  and  in  some  sort  spiritualized  form 
the  methods  by  which  hypnosis  is  ordinarily  ob- 
tained." ^ 

Suggestive  power,  of  the  kind  M.  Bergson  de- 
scribes, should  indeed  be  at  the  artist's  command. 
Unfortunately  the  romanticist  only  too  often  does, 
not  go  any  further.  He  rests  in  the  hypnosis  for 
the  sake  of  the  hypnosis,  or,  as  I  have  said  else- 
where, in  illusion  for  the  sake  of  illusion.  He  is 
interested  in  art  only  as  it  is  related  to  the  senses 

'  For  a  working  out  of  this  point  of  view,  see  P.  Souriau :  Let: 
suggestion  datts  Vart. 

*  Les  donnees  immediates  de  la  conscience,  p.  1 1. 

[  129  ] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

and  not  as  it  is  related  to  the  intellect  and  character 
and  will.  The  pure  asstheticism  of  Keats  was  per- 
haps a  legitimate  reaction  from  the  dryness  and 
didacticism  of  certain  pseudo-classicists,  who,  so  far 
from  knowing  how  to  act  suggestively  on  several 
senses  at  once,  did  not  even  know  how  to  make  a 
right  appeal  to  any  one  sense.  But  to  accept  this 
aestheticism  as  final  would  be  to  turn  poetry  into  a 
sort  of  lotus-eating.  The  great  poets  of  the  past 
have  practiced  suggestiveness,  but  only  as  one  ele- 
ment of  their  art  and  with  infinitely  greater  sobriety 
than  our  modern  romanticists.  It  is  doubtful  if  any 
one  of  them  can  rival  in  this  respect  the  **  fine  excess  " 
of  Keats ;  whether  any  one  of  them  devised  so  many 
"subtle  hieroglyphs,"  to  use  Diderot's  term, — so 
many  words  or  phrases  that  evoke  some  object  before 
the  inner  eye,  or  charm  the  ear  by  an  unheard  melody ; 
that  invite,  in  short,  to  intense  aesthetic  contempla- 
tion. There  are  probably  more  expressions  of  this 
kind,  as  Matthew  Arnold  says,  in  the  tale  of  "  Isa- 
bella "  alone  than  in  all  the  extant  plays  of  Sophocles. 
"  But  the  action,  the  story  ?  "  Arnold  asks  ;  and  he 
goes  on  to  show  how  inferior  the  story  is  in  Keats 
to  the  same  story  as  told  by  Boccaccio,  "  who  above 
[  130] 


« 


WORD-PAINTING 

all  things  delineates  his  object ;  who  subordinates 
expression  to  that  which  it  is  designed  to  express." 
The  deflecting  of  literature  from  either  rational 
or  dramatic  purpose  to  suggestive  word-painting, 
which  so  marked  one  whole  side  of  the  romantic 
movement,  is  closely  related  to  what  I  have  defined 
as  primitivism  ;  to  the  contempt  of  the  reason  and  the 
things  that  are  above  the  reason,  joined  with  a  de- 
sire to  return  to  nature  and  so  recover  the  unity  of 
instinct.  The  prime  virtue  for  the  romanticist  is  to 
have  fresh  and  spontaneous  sensations,  or  else  to 
revive  in  memory  the  freshness  and  vividness  of 
past  sensations  and  then  convey  them  suggestively 
to  others.  Romantic  word-painting,  we  should  recol- 
lect, is  not  merely  the  art  of  suggesting  images  to 
others,  but  first  of  all  of  suggesting  them  to  one's 
self.  Wordsworth,  for  example,  begins  by  seeing  the 
"host  of  golden  daffodils,"  and  then  later — 

They  flash  upon  that  inward  eye 
Which  is  the  bliss  of  solitude  ; 

finally  he  succeeds  in  conveying  the  vision  in  all  its 

freshness  to  us. 

The  inward  eye  of  which  Wordsworth  speaks  was 

comparatively  dormant  in  men  before  the  last  cen- 

[131] 


THE  NEW   LAOKOON 

tury ;  since  then  it  has  been  so  developed  as  to  be- 
come a  sort  of  new  sense  that  brings  the  objects  of 
outer  nature  into  contact  with  the  soul  through  the 
medium  of  imaginative  illusion,  refining  them  in  the 
process,  and  attuning  them  to  human  emotion.  This 
new  sense  is  in  itself  delightful  and  legitimate,  and 
the  revery  with  which  it  is  associated  has  its  own 

*  uses.  The  romantic  error  has  been  to  make  of  this 
revery  the  serious  substance  of  life  instead  of  its 
occasional  solace  ;  to  set  up  the  things  that  are  below 
the  reason  as  a  substitute  for  those  that  are  above 
it ;  in  short,  to  turn  the  nature  cult  into  a  re- 
ligion. 

L-  We  should  note  that  in  its  more  advanced  forms 
the  nature  cult  leads  to  a  new  symbolism.  Accord- 
ing to  Coleridge  the  imagination  is  the  great  unify- 
ing power,  and  what  it  unifies  through  the  agency 
of  the  new  sense  of  which  I  have  just  been  speak- 
ing, is  man  and  physical  nature.  Outer  objects  no 
longer  seem  foreign  and  alien  to  man,  but  akin  to  I 
something  in  his  own  mind.  "  The  world  is  a  uni-  ! 
versal  trope  of  the  spirit,"  says  Novalis.  "  Every 
object  of  which  the  wood  is  composed,"  writes 
Hugo,  "corresponds  to  some  similar  object  in  the 
[  132] 


WORD-PAINTING 

forest  of  the  soul."  '  The  deeper  a  man  dives  down 
into  the  subrational  region  where  such  intuitions 
occur,  the  more  he  has  this  feehng  not  merely  of 
correspondencies  between  himself  and  outer  nature 
but  between  the  different  senses  within  himself.  He 
finally  attains  that  "  tenebrous  and  profound  unity  " 
of  which  Baudelaire  speaks,  where  "  perfumes  and 
colors  and  sounds  correspond  to  one  another."  ^ 
The  most  striking  thing  about  the  romantic  sym- 

I  Tout  objet  dont  le  bois  se  compose  repond 
A  quelque  objet  pareil  dans  la  foret  de  I'ame. 

Voix  InierieureSf  xix. 
*  Baudelaire's  sonnet  has  been  so  influential  on  more  recent 
French  writers  and  artists  (especially  the  symbolists)  that  it  de- 
serves to  be  quoted  :  — 

CORRESPONDANCES 

La  Nature  est  un  temple  ou  de  vivants  piliers 
Laissent  parfois  sortir  de  confuses  paroles ; 
L'homme  y  passe  4  travers  des  forets  de  symboles 
Qui  robservent  avec  des  regards  familiers. 

Comme  de  longs  ^chos  qui  de  loin  se  confondent 

Dans  une  t^nebreuse  et  profonde  unite, 

Vaste  comme  la  nuit  et  comme  la  clart^, 

Les  parfums,  les  couleurs  et  les  sons  se  rdpondent. 

II  est  des  parfums  frais  comme  des  chairs  d'enfants, 
Doux  comme  les  hautbois,  verts  comme  les  prairies  ; 
Et  d'autres,  corrompus,  riches  et  triomphants, 

Ayant  I'expansion  des  choses  infinies, 

Comme  I'ambre,  le  muse,  le  benjoin  et  I'encens, 

Qui  chantent  les  transports  de  I'esprit  et  des  sens. 

[   133] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

bol  is  its  subjective  character.  A  man  may  discover 
any  number  of  correspondencies  between  him- 
self and  outer  nature,  without  thereby  developing 
correspondencies  between  himself  and  other  men. 
Quite  the  contrary :  the  more  he  yields  to  this 
symbolizing  mood,  the  farther  he  is  likely  to  get  off 
into  some  dim  realm,  some  "mystic  mid-region  of 
Weir,"  where  no  one  can  penetrate  but  himself. 
We  may  indeed  say  of  the  whole  tendency  in  its 
extremer  forms,  "that  way  madness  lies."  The 
romantic  symbol  which  is  vague  and  shadowy  in 
literature  becomes  doubly  so  in  painting.  Certain 
ultra-romantic  painters  (Rossetti  for  example)  have 
indulged  in  a  symbolism  that  may  well  match  for 
obscurity  the  pseudo  -  classic  allegories  of  which 
Lessing  complains.' 

We  should  not,  however,  allow  the  romanticists 
to  put  us  entirely  out  of  humor  with  the  symbol. 
The  imagination  is  the  great  unifying  power,  but  it 
may  be  used  to  help  forward  and  symbolize  man's 

'  As  an  example  of  the  mysterious  symbolizing  that  may  arise 
from  the  confusion  of  plastic  art  with  music  we  may  take  Max 
Klinger's  statue  of  Beethoven.  See  Gazette  des  Beaux-Arts,  3* 
Periode,  t.  xl,  pp.  509,  516,  517. 

[134] 


WORD-PAINTING 

union  with  the  truths  of  reason  or  the  truths  above 
the  reason,  as  well  as  with  outer  nature.  There  is, 
in  short,  a  humanistic  as  well  as  a  naturalistic  use 
of  the  imagination.  Even  Wordsworth  could  not 
fail  to  be  struck  by  the  two  types  of  imagination, 
one  of  which  he  terms  the  "  enthusiastic  and  medi- 
tative," and  the  other  the  "human  and  dramatic." 
We  may  take  as  a  concrete  instance  of  the  human- 
istic imagination  and  the  symbol  it  may  create,  the 
Chariot  of  the  Soul  in  Plato's  "  Phasdrus  "  ;  of  the 
naturalistic  imagination  and  its  symbolizing,  Victor 
Hugo's  poem  "  Le  Satyre  "  in  "La  Legende  des 
Siecles."  Plato's  symbol,  dealing  as  it  does  with  the 
things  that  are  above  the  ordinary  reason,  inspires 
to  awe  and  reverence  and  restraint.  Hugo's  "Satyre  " 
on  the  other  hand  is  related  so  closely  to  the  whole 
modern  movement  we  are  studying  that  we  can 
afford  to  linger  over  it  a  moment. 

A  hideous  and  hirsute  satyr  so  offends  against 
decency  that  he  is  finally  dragged  by  Hercules  be- 
fore Jupiter  and  the  other  Olympians  ;  but  he  sings 
a  mysterious  song  that  sends  a  sympathetic  thrill 
through  the  whole  of  creation,  and  as  he  sings  he 
keeps  expanding  and  at  the  same  time  melting  into 
[135] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

the  outer  world,  until  at  last  he  is  revealed  as  the 
god  Pan  and  Jupiter  cowers  before  him.  The  poem 
symbolizes  the  running  together  and  unifying  of  all 
things  (especially  of  flesh  and  spirit)  through  the 
power  of  the  primal  love  working  in  the  depths  of 
the  primitive,  the  unconscious,  the  instinctive ;  it 
invites  to  vast  emotional  expansion,  and  at  the  same 
time  to  revolt,  not  merely  against  every  form  of  au- 
thority and  discipline,  but  against  all  boundaries  and 
limitations  whatsoever,  as  synonymous  with  evil. 

Symbolism  is  no  necessary  concomitant  of  ro- 
mantic suggestiveness.  It  has  appeared  most  fre- 
quently, though  not  exclusively,  in  connection  with 
that  side  of  modern  art  which  has  aimed  to  be 
musically  rather  than  pictorially  suggestive.  The 
kind  of  word -painter  who  has  flourished  during 
the  past  century  has  usually  been  content  to  paint 
vividly  to  the  imagination  either  present  impres- 
sions or  else  past  impressions  that  have  flashed 
upon  his  inward  eye  in  revery.  Rousseau  contains 
remarkable  examples  of  this  latter  kind  of  descrip- 
tion. "  I  see  distinctly,"  he  says,  "  only  what  I  re- 
member "  ;  and  what  he  remembers  with  most  plea- 
sure is  his  youthful  years  when  sensations  were 
[136] 


WORD-PAINTING 

freshest  and  most  spontaneous.  **  The  slightest  cir- 
cumstances  of  that  time  please  me,"  he  says  of  his 
boyhood  experiences  at  Bossey,  "  for  the  very  rea- 
son that  they  belong  to  that  time.  ...  I  still  see 
a  swallow  darting  in  through  the  window,  a  fly 
alighting  on  my  hand  while  I  recited  my  lesson ;  I 
see  the  arrangement  of  the  room  where  we  sat ;  the 
study  of  M.  Lambercier  at  our  right,  an  engraving 
representing  all  the  popes,  a  barometer,  a  great  cal- 
endar ;  —  raspberry-bushes  which,  growing  in  a  gar- 
den slanting  steeply  up  from  the  back  of  the  house, 
shaded  the  window  and  sometimes  trailed  even  into 
the  room." 

The  whole  scene  rises  before  us  "as  from  the 
stroke  of  the  Enchanter's  wand."  Here  is  a  some- 
what different  word-painting  from  that  of  the  imi- 
tators of  Thomson's  "Seasons."  No  one  before 
Rousseau,  at  least  no  one  of  whom  we  have  literary 
record,  had  ever  shown  such  preternatural  keenness 
either  in  receiving  or  recalling  impressions.  This 
sensitiveness  of  Rousseau  extended  to  all  his  impres- 
sions, especially  those  of  sight,  smell,  and  hearing. 
(According  to  Diderot,'  Rousseau  had  thought  of 

*  Diderot,  (Euvres,  I,  p.  332. 
[137] 


THE  NEW   LAOKOON 

starting  a  school  to  teach  the  flower-girls  of  Paris 
how  to  sort  the  colors  in  their  bouquets.)  "  Not 
only  do  I  remember,"  he  says  in  describing  another 
scene  of  his  youth,  "  the  time,  the  place,  the  per- 
sons, but  all  surrounding  objects, —  the  temperature 
of  the  air,  its  odor,  its  color,  a  certain  local  impres- 
sion felt  only  there,  the  vivid  recollection  of  which 
carries  me  back  anew";  and  he  proceeds  to  paint 
another  word-picture  of  rare  intensity  and  sugges- 
tiveness.  "Local  impression  "  would  in  some  re- 
spects have  been  a  more  fortunate  phrase  than  the 
term  local  color  that  the  romanticists  finally  bor- 
rowed from  the  technical  vocabulary  of  the  painter. 
A  rendering  of  the  various  sensations  can  in  some 
cases  (e.  g.,  in  the  case  of  taste  or  smell)  be  called 
local  color  only  by  a  forced  metaphor  ;  whereas  to 
call  these  sensations  and  the  art  of  rendering  them 
suggestively  "  local  impressions,"  would  relate  the 
whole  tendency  to  that  modern  impressionism  of 
which  it  is  only  one  aspect. 

The  poet  Gray  says  that  he  took  to  botany  to 
save  himself  the  trouble  of  thinking.    This  remark 
'\  might  apply  at  least  equally  well  to  many  romanti- 
cists who  took  to  local  color.    In  one  of  his  tales 
[138] 


WORD-PAINTING 

("Le  Merle  Blanc  "),  Alfred  de  Musset  insinuates 
that  all  this  minute  lingering  over  the  scenes  of 
childhood  was  a  convenient  way  of  producing  the 
maximum  amount  of  "  copy  "  with  the  minimum 
expense  of  intellect.  In  this  tale  Musset  makes  fun 
of  his  fellow  romanticists,  whom  he  disguises  as 
birds.  The  "  white  blackbird,"  when  turned  out  of 
the  nest  that  his  mother  had  built  in  an  old  wooden 
porringer  in  the  depths  of  a  sequestered  garden,  de- 
cides to  set  up  as  romantic  poet  and  publishes  a 
poem  in  forty-eight  cantos  the  subject  of  which  was 
—  himself.  "  In  this  poem  I  related  my  past  suffer- 
ings with  charming  fatuity.  I  informed  the  reader 
of  a  thousand  domestic  details  of  the  most  piquant 
interest.  The  description  of  my  mother's  porringer 
took  up  no'less  than  fourteen  cantos ;  I  had  counted 
its  grooves,  its  holes,  its  bumps,  its  nicks,  its  splin- 
ters, its  nails,  its  spots,  its  different  tints  and  shim- 
mers ;  I  exhibited  the  inside,  the  outside,  the  rim,  the 
bottom,  the  sides,  the  inclined  planes,  the  perpendicu- 
larities ;  passing  to  the  contents,  I  had  studied  the 
wisps  of  grass  and  straw,  the  dry  leaves,  the  tiny 
bits  of  wood,  the  gravel,  the  drops  of  water,  the 
remains  of  flies,  the  broken  cockchafers'  legs 
[139] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

that  were  in  it ;  it  was  a  ravishing  description, 
but  don't  think  that  I  would  have  printed  it  all  at 
once ;  there  are  impertinent  readers  who  would 
have  skipped  it.  I  had  skillfully  cut  it  up  and 
mingled  it  with  the  story  in  order  that  none  of  it 
should  be  lost ;  so  that  at  the  most  interesting  and 
dramatic  moment  there  suddenly  came  in  fifteen 
pages  of  porringer." 

What  appears  in  such  a  passage,  quite  apart  from 
the  desire  to  turn  out  copy,  is  the  drift  of  romantic 
writing  away  from  ideas  toward  sensations,  from  ac- 
tion toward  revery.  For  the  romanticist,  life  is  no 
longer  a  drama  with  a  definite  purpose,  but  a  dream 
the  moods  of  which  are  reflected  in  outer  nature,  so 
that  to  portray  outer  nature  is  only  another  form  of 
self-portrayal.  As  man  thus  melts  into  nature,  his 
vocabulary  melts  into  nature  with  him  and  tak?s  on 
all  its  variegated  hues.  The  French  language  had 
become  too  abstract  and  intellectual,  say&  Sainte- 
Beuve ;  Rousseau  "  put  green"  into  it.  Suofi  a  phrase 
as  "the  gold  of  the  broom  and  the  purple  of  the 
heather  " '  marked  an  epoch  in  French  prose.  The 

'  "  L'or  des  genets  et  la  pourpre  de  la  bniyere  "  {Leitre  h  M. 
de  Maleskerbes,  26  Janvier,  1762). 

[  140] 


WORD-PAINTING 

charm  of  this  descriptive  writing  of  Rousseau's  is 
that  it  still  retains  a  certain  sobriety ;  there  is  still 
a  balance  between  the  intellectual  and  the  sensuous 
elements  in  his  style.  In  Rousseau's  immediate  dis- 
ciple, Bernardin  de  Saint -Pierre,  the  intellectual 
element  yields  to  a  more  abundant  and  more  precise 
use  of  the  picturesque  descriptive  epithet ;  at  the 
same  time  exoticism  makes  its  appearance.  From 
Bernardin  de  Saint-Pierre  to  Loti '  the  whole  globe 
has  been  ransacked  for  **  local  impressions."  The 
ambition  of  this  modern  descriptive  school  has  been 
to  render  every  object  in  its  ultimate  differences 
from  every  other  object.  To  this  end  it  has  resorted 
to  an  ever  finer  and  more  delicate  shading  ;  it  has 
tried  to  seize  the  shimmer  and  the  half-tint ;  its 
motto  has  been  la  miaiice^  la  mia7ice  toiijoiirs  !  Ber- 
nardin de  Saint-Pierre  complained  of  Chateaubriand, 
his  immediate  successor  in  the  art  of  word-painting, 

'  In  her  life  of  Bernardin  de  Saint-Pierre  (pp.  48-55)  Arvede 
Barine  makes  an  interesting  comparison  between  the  description  of 
a  storm  by  Saint-Pierre  and  a  similar  description  by  Pierre  Loti. 
She  concludes :  "  Apres  les  pages  qu'on  vient  de  lire,  il  ne  reste 
plus  de  progres  a  faire.  Le  seul  a  tenter  serait  de  revenir  i  la 
simplicite  puissante  d'Homere,  de  Lucrece  et  de  Virgile,  et  de 
procurer  les  memes  emotions  en  deux  ou  trois  lignes." 

[141] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

that  he  had  too  strong  an  imagination.  "  I,"  said 
Saint-Pierre,  "  apply  my  colors  delicately,  he  lays  on 
his  with  a  broad  stroke  of  the  brush."  But  Chateau- 
briand is  as  remarkable  for  his  fine  shading  as  he 
is  for  the  splash  of  color.  He  already  speaks  of  the 
"  pearl-gray  light  of  the  moon,"  though  this  nuance 
itself  would  no  doubt  seem  too  vague  and  approxi- 
mate to  later  writers  like  the  Goncourts,  who  de- 
veloped the  lust  of  the  eye  to  its  ultimate  refine- 
ments. 

Chateaubriand  deserves  a  central  place  in  any  dis- 
cussion of  the  modern  forms  of  descriptive  writing. 
He  is  the  eldest  son  of  Jean-Jacques,  and  at  the 
same  time  the  father  of  nineteenth-century  French 
literature.  He  was  a  Breton,  and  one  may  perhaps 
without  being  too  fanciful  see  in  his  art  something 
of  the  magic  of  the  Celt.  He  is  a  master  of  the 
hieroglyphic  p"ainting  of  which  Diderot  speaks,  of 
the  word  or  phrase  of  mysterious  and  compelling 
charm  that  usually  eludes  analysis  and  defies  trans- 
lation. Stendhal  says  that  duels  were  fought  in  his 
regiment  over  one  of  these  phrases :  la  cime  ind^- 
termin^e  des  forits,  —  a  phrase  chosen  by  Matthew 
Arnold  as  an  example  of  descriptive  magic.  We  can 
[  142] 


WORD-PAINTING 

well  understand  that  a  Frenchman  of  the  old  school 
who  was  looking  for  rationality  rather  than  for 
word-painting,  suggestive  or  not,  should  have  found 
a  predominance  of  such  phrases  a  scandal.  And  in- 
deed it  is  plain  that  the  equilibrium  is  already  disap- 
pearing in  Chateaubriand  between  the  intellectual 
and  sensuous  elements  in  style.  This  is  one  of  the 
main  reasons  why  Sainte-Beuve  pronounced  Cha- 
teaubriand the  first  great  writer  of  the  decadence. 
Possibly  nothing  better  has  ever  been  written  on  the 
proper  limits  of  descriptive  writing  than  some  of 
the  passages  in  which  Sainte-Beuve  discusses  this 
side  of  Chateaubriand. 

"Poetic  and  picturesque  prose,"  says  Sainte- 
Beuve,  "  is,  so  to  speak,  only  an  outlying  province 
of  prose,  its  richest  and  most  brilliant  province,  an 
Asia  Minor,  as  the  ancients  would  have  said.  If  lan- 
guage fixes  and  concentrates  itself  in  this  province 
entirely,  it  runs  the  risk  of  becoming  corrupt  and  los- 
ing its  true  character."  Sainte-Beuve  goes  on  to  say 
that  a  really  great  prose-writer  dwells,  in  some  sort, 
at  the  very  source  and  centre  of  thought,  and  from 
there,  as  occasion  arises,  he  moves  in  any  direction 
desired.  "  If  there  is  need  of  narration,  he  narrates  ; 
[143] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

of  reasoning  and  discussing,  he  discusses  ;  of  de- 
scribing and  painting,  he  has  colors ;  he  is  present 
everywhere  and  almost  simultaneously  at  every  point 
of  the  vast  empire.  The  prose  of  Buffon  or  Jean- 
Jacques  is  noble,  just,  vigorous,  supple,  and  brilliant, 
equal  to  all  uses,  preeminent  in  several,  and  not 
appearing  out  of  place  or  embarrassed  wherever 
used.  Can  we  say  as  much  of  the  prose  of  Chateau- 
briand or  even  of  that  of  Bernardin  de  Saint-Pierre  ? 
Through  the  very  fact  that  they  have  become  fixed 
and  as  it  were  acclimated  in  the  region  of  pure 
picturesqueness,  when  the  subject  invites  or  forces 
them  to  leave  this  region,  they  do  not  do  so  natu- 
rally or  with  ease;  they  have  farther  to  go.  .  .  . 
Every  language  has  its  genius,  its  scope,  its 
limits.  It  is  perilous  to  try  to  displace  its  centre,  to 
venture  to  change  its  capital,  even  though  one  were 
Constantine.  Chateaubriand  was  somewhat  like  the 
great  emperor  he  celebrated ;  he  transferred  the 
centre  of  prose  from  Rome  to  Byzantium.  .  .  . 
Now  the  capital  of  a  language  thus  pushed  over  to 
its  extreme  frontier  is  very  near  the  barbarians."  ' 

'  Chateaubriand  et  son  groupe  littiraire,  t.  i,  pp.  251-256;  d 
also  pp.  242,  243. 

[  144] 


WORD-PAINTING 

Here  is  something  that  satisfies  our  modern 
sense  of  the  problem  more  nearly  than  anything  in 
Lessing.  Suggestive  word-painting  is,  within  proper 
bounds,  an  entirely  legitimate  art ;  when  it  over- 
steps these  bounds,  when  images  are  offered  as 
a  substitute  for  ideas,  when  words  are  turned  to 
purely  voluptuary  uses  and  divorced  from  rational 
purpose,  the  result  is  not  a  real  advance  but  rather 
the  beginning  of  decadence.  Keats  prayed  in  his 
more  callow  days  for  a  "life  of  sensations  rather 
than  thoughts."  Many  modern  romanticists  have 
aspired  to  live  this  life,  and  often  with  considerable 
success.  '^We  can  trace  with  special  clearness  in  the 
romanticism  of  nineteenth-century  France  this  ten- 
dency toward  a  hypertrophy  of  sensation  and  an 
atrophy  of  ideas,  toward  a  constantly  expanding 
sensormm  and  a  diminishing  intellect.  Judged  by 
any  standard  Rousseau  is  a  man  of  intellectual 
power,  and  he  seems  especially  great  in  this  respect 
when  compared  with  Chateaubriand.  Chateaubriand 
in  turn  appears  an  intellectual  giant  com.pared 
with  Lamartine.  Lamartine's  ideas  begin  to  look 
serious  when  compared  with  those  of  Hugo;  Hugo 
himself  strikes  one  as  intellectually  active  com- 
[145] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

pared  with  Paul  Verlaine.  Traces  of  cerebration  may 
be  discovered  even  in  Verlaine  compared  with  some 
of  the  later  symbolists.  In  these  last  anaemic  repre- 
sentatives of  the  school  we  arrive  at  something  ap- 
proaching a  sheer  intellectual  vacuum,  —  the  mere 
buzzing  of  the  romantic  chimera  in  the  void.  Such 
is  the  result  of  divorcing  literature  from  rational 
purpose  and  reducing  it  to  the  quest  of  sensation ; 
for  it  is  the  quest  of  sensation  that  is  at  the  bottom 
of  the  whole  movement,  however  much  this  quest 
may  at  any  time  assume  the  guise  of  a  heavenly 
idealism.  Sainte-Beuve  distinguishes  two  main  forms 
of  sensuality  in  French  writers  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  "The  ones,"  he  says,  "disciples  of  Rene, 
have  as  it  were  concealed  their  sensuality  behind  a 
cloud  of  mysticism ;  the  others  have  frankly  un- 
masked it."  ' 

But  I  have  already  spoken  of  the  peculiar  use  the 
romanticists  made  of  imaginative  illusion.  It  is  a 
natural  sequel  to  Rousseau's  special  conception  of 

'  Causeries  du  lundi,  ii,  p.  459.  Sainte-Beuve  was  himself  a 
"disciple  of  Rene"  in  his  novel  Vohipti.  "Dans  VohtptS"  he 
says,  "  je  me  suis  donne  I'illusion  mystique  pour  colorer  et  en- 
ttuager  repicnrisme."  [Ibid.,  xvi,  p.  43.) 

[146] 


I 


WORD-PAINTING 

the  original  and  the  spontaneous  joined  to  his  con- 
tempt for  rationality.  The  writer  of  the  Rousseau- 
istic  type  is  no  longer  a  thinker  or  a  purposeful 
agent  who  is  trying  to  give  an  account  of  his 
thoughts  or  his  purpose  to  others,  but  an  exquisitely 
organized  mechanism  for  registering  impressions 
and  conveying  them  suggestively.  Unfortunately 
the  more  successful  the  writer  is  in  this  pursuit  of 
sensation  for  its  own  sake,  the  more  intense  and 
local  his  impressions  become,  the  more  closely  they 
are  likely  to  be  related  to  the  side  of  man  and  outer 
nature  that  is  fugitive  and  evanescent,  and  the  far- 
ther they  are  likely  to  be  from  what  is  of  permanent 
appeal,  from  the  normal,  the  representative,  the 
human.  We  have  curious  testimony  on  this  point 
from  a  writer  who  himself  belongs  to  the  school  of 
sensation,  though  he  did  not  achieve  in  his  own 
style  the  refinements  of  what  the  French  call  Vecri- 
ture  artiste.  "The  worst  of  it  is,"  says  Emile  Zola, 
"that  I  have  arrived  at  the  conviction  that  the  jargon 
of  our  period  will  be  known  as  one  of  the  most 
atrocious  of  the  French  language.  .  .  ,  Look  at 
Voltaire,  with  his  dry  style,  his  vigorous  period, 
destitute  of  adjectives,  which  relates  and  does  not 
[147] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

paint ;  he  remains  eternally  young.  Look  at  Rous- 
seau, who  is  our  father  —  look  at  his  imagery,  his 
passionate  rhetoric  ;  he  has  written  pages  which  are 
perfectly  intolerable.  ...  A  cheerful  fate  awaits 
us  who  have  outbidden  Rousseau,  who  on  the  top  of 
literature  pile  all  the  other  arts — paint  and  sing 
our  periods,  chisel  them  as  if  they  were  blocks  of 
marble,  and  require  words  to  reproduce  the  perfume 
of  things.  All  this  titillates  our  nerves  :  we  think 
it  exquisite,  perfect.  But  what  will  our  great-grand- 
children say  to  it  .-*  " 

This  passage  does  not  altogether  hit  the  mark. 
There  are  pages  of  Rousseau  that  are  at  least  as 
assured  of  immortality  as  any  of  Voltaire's,  and  are 
at  the  same  time  filled  with  color  and  imagery.  Art 
can  stand  plenty  of  fresh  and  vivid  impressions,  and 
indeed  requires  them,  only  they  must  be  subordi- 
nated to  something  higher  than  themselves.  What 
we  have  in  the  great  artists  is  the  intellectualizing 
of  sensation,  and  not,  as  in  the  writers  to  whom 
Zola  refers,  the  sensualizing  of  intellect.  In  his 
essay  on  Iidouard  Bertin,  Taine  expresses  his  regret 
that  the  romantic  landscape-painters  were  more  in- 
tent on  the  rendering  of  minute  local  impressions 
[  148  ] 


WORD-PAINTING 

than  on  the  broad  intellectual  purpose  and  total 
effect.  And  he  notes  how  the  special  sensitiveness 
of  the  eye  that  they  thus  developed  tended  toward 
what  I  have  called  in  a  previous  chapter  hyperaes- 
thesia.  "Toward  the  end,"  he  says,  "the  nervous 
and  mental  equilibrium  was  no  longer  intact  even 
in  the  masters."  In  their  successors  the  balance  was 
still  more  completely  lost  and  always  in  favor  of 
"  sensation,  absorbing,  physical,  personal.  Now  that 
the  experiment  has  been  tried,  the  pathway  that  we 
have  been  following  since  1830  is  seen  to  have 
descended  swiftly  and  by  a  steep  declivity  ;  we  are 
stumbling  along  it  to-day,  and  that  is  even  truer  of 
painting  with  words  than  of  painting  with  the  brush." 
The  reason  is  evident :  for  if  a  painter  errs  in  taking 
a  purely  retinal  view  of  painting,  a  poet  errs  still 
more  grievously  in  taking  a  purely  retinal  —  or 
auricular  —  view  of  poetry.  This  is  plainly  the  case 
with  Gautier  when  he  praises  as  the  finest  in  the 
French  language  certain  verses  of  Hugo  that  are 
found  on  examination  to  be  made  up  entirely  of 
proper  names !  In  no  great  poet  of  the  past  do  we 
have  to  lay  primary  stress,  as  we  do  in  Hugo,  on 
the  special  structure  of  the  eye.  He  had  an  almost 
[  149] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

miraculous  vision,  at  once  telescopic  and  micro- 
scopic. But  the  extraordinary  abundance  and  preci- 
sion of  his  picturesque  details  are  only  too  often  the 
sign  of  the  predominance  of  matter  over  spirit.  In 
Hugo  the  idea  if  not  absent  altogether  is  usually  the 
mere  shadow  of  the  image  and  not,  as  it  should  be, 
the  soul.  No  other  poet  ever  gave  so  tremendous  an 
orchestration  to  such  trifling  themes.  If  not  intel- 
lectual, Hugo's  verse  is  at  least  emotional  as  well  as 
pictorial.  Gautier's  verse,  on  the  contrary,  is  almost 
purely  pictorial.  Perhaps  more  than  any  other  writer 
ancient  or  modern  he  deliberately  attempted  to  effect 
a  transposition  d'art,  to  rival  with  words  the  palette 
of  the  painter.  He  says  of  one  of  his  short  poems 
that  only  a  frame  is  needed,  and  a  hook  to  hang  it 
on,  to  make  of  it  a  complete  picture.  His  verse  is 
as  extraordinary  for  its  visual  suggestiveness  as  it 
is  for  its  intellectual  nullity.  ^' 

The  assertion  has  been  made  that  Gautier's  word- 
painting  proves  that  Lessing  was  mistaken  in  the 
main  thesis  of  the  "  Laokoon."  This  assertion  can 
be  only  partially  allowed.  Lessing  certainly  does  not 
do  justice  to  one  important  side  of  the  problem,  — 
the  r61e  of  imaginative  illusion.  He  was  interested 
[150]  I 


WORD-PAINTING 

less  in  the  attenuated  hypnosis  that  art  may  pro 
duce,  than  in  art  as  related  to  intellect  and  action. 
Yet  his  main  argument  does  not  entirely  lose  its 
validity  even  in  the  case  of  the  suggestive  word- 
painter.  The  suggestive  word-painter  can  merely 
stir  into  activity  images  that  are  already  present 
consciously  or  subconsciously  in  the  mind  of  an- 
other ;  even  then  it  will  be  only  a  kindred  image, 
not  the  same  image  as  that  of  which  the  word- 
painter  is  himself  dreaming  or  which  he  has  actually 
before  his  eyes.  For  example,  if  the  word-painter 
describes  suggestively  a  mountain,  a  mountain  may 
flash  on  the  inner  eye  of  the  reader,  though  it  will 
not  be  the  same  mountain  as  was  before  the  actual 
or  inner  eye  of  the  describer.  If  the  word-painter 
describes  suggestively  some  specific  mountain,  for 
instance  Mont  Blanc,  and  the  reader  has  also  seen 
Mont  Blanc  or  a  picture  of  it,  then  the  visions  in 
the  minds  of  the  word-painter  and  of  the  reader  may 
come  nearer  to  being  identical.  On  the  other  hand,, 
if  a  man  were  a  good  artist,  but  had  never  been  in 
China  or  seen  pictures  of  Chinese  objects,  would  all 
the  verbal  magic  of  Loti's  "  Last  Days  of  Peking" 
enable  him  to  paint  anything  that  really  resembled 
[  151  ] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

the  Summer  Palace  ?  Let  us  suppose,  again,  that  A 
wishes  to  paint  suggestively,  with  words,  an  actual 
woman  to  B  who  has  never  seen  her.  He  will  suc- 
ceed at  most  in  evoking  before  the  inner  eye  of  B  a 
dream-woman.  Let  us  suppose  also  that  B  is  a  good 
artist  and  proceeds  to  paint  his  vision.  Is  it  not 
evident  that  the  painting  will  be  no  true  likeness  of 
the  real  woman  ?  Frequently  the  word-painter  will 
not  even  succeed  in  evoking  a  dream-image,  but 
will  lay  himself  open  to  the  charge  that  Lessing 
brought  against  Ariosto's  portrait  of  Alcina. 

In  writing  about  the  Goncourts  and  their  descrip- 
tive virtuosity  Sainte-Beuve  remarks  on  the  objec- 
tions that  might  be  made  to  *'  this  formidable  en- 
croachment of  one  art  on  another,  this  outrageous 
invasion  of  prose  by  pure  painting."  He  cites  as  an 
example  the  description  by  the  Goncourts  of  six 
women  filing  one  after  the  other  into  a  ball-room. 
In  spite  of  the  efforts  of  the  writers  to  paint  dis- 
tinctly and  separately  these  six  heads,  Sainte-Beuve 
complains  that  they  do  not  succeed  in  making  him 
see  them.  "  I  confuse  them  in  spite  of  myself ;  six  — 
it's  too  much  for  my  somewhat  feeble  imagination; 
prose  is  not  equal  to  the  task.  I  should  need  to 
[152] 


WORD-PAINTING 

have  the  objects  themselves  before  my  eyes.  There 
is  plainly  a  confusion  here  between  the  means  of 
expression  of  one  art  and  those  of  another."' 

To  take  an  illustration  from  another  order  of 
sensations  :  when  Kipling  speaks  of  "  the  lift  of 
the  great  Cape  combers,  and  the  smell  of  the  baked 
Karroo,"  the  first  part  of  the  line  may  suggest  an 
image  to  any  one  who  is  familiar  with  the  sea.  But  the 
smell  of  the  baked  Karroo,  though  no  doubt  a  very 
intense  local  impression  for  Kipling  himself,  will  not 
really  suggest  anything  to  one  who  has  not  been  in 
South  Africa. 

At  best  the  art  of  verbal  suggestion  is,  as  Dide- 
rot already  remarked,  infinitely  subtle  and  uncertain, 
and  doubly  subjective.  An  expression  may  have  for 
some  particular  reader  a  suggestiveness  that  it  did 
not  have  for  its  writer  and  may  not  have  for  other 
readers.  Think  of  the  gorgeous  visions  that  the 
simple  phrase  Consul  Romaniis  suggested  to  Thomas 
De  Quincey  —  with  the  aid  of  opium.  The  "hier- 
oglyphs "  again,  which  the  writer  meant  to  charge 
with  suggestiveness,  may  fail,  and  then  instead  of 
words  that  appeal  to  two  senses  at  once,  words,  that 

*  Nouveaiix  Lundis,  t.  x,  pp.  407,  408. 
[153] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

as  Rostand  says,  "  you  read  with  your  ears  and  listen 
to  with  your  eyes,"  '  you  merely  have  words  that 
follow  one  another  inertly  and  are  no  better  than  the 
word-painting  Lessing  condemns.  In  short,  even 
those  who  possess  verbal  magic  are  often  unsuc- 
cessful, and  for  one  true  magician  there  are  twenty 
pretenders. 

I  have  not  distinguished  very  sharply  thus  far 
between  pictorial  and  musical  suggestiveness ;  yet 
the  art  of  suggesting  colors  or  images  is  evidently 
very  different  from  that  of  suggesting  sounds. 
Though  the  two  arts  may  coexist  in  one  writer, 
they  are  more  commonly  found  separate.  The 
prose  of  Chateaubriand,  for  example,  has  both  kinds 
of  suggestiveness ;  but  as  we  come  down  to  more 
recent  French  writers  we  usually  find  that  a  sort  of 
specialization  has  taken  place.  Thus  Lamartine's  soul 
"exhales  itself  like  a  sad  and  melodious  strain,"  to 
use  his  own  phrase.  His  poetry  is  comparatively 
poor  in  visual  suggestiveness.    Leconte  de  Lisle  on 

*  La  merveille 
Du  beau  mot  mysterieux, 
C'est  qu'on  le  lit  de  I'oreille, 
Et  qu'on  I'ecoute  des  yeux. 

[154] 


WORD-PAINTING 

the  other  hand,  and  most  of  the  so-called  Pamas- 
sienSy  following  more  or  less  the  lead  of  Gautier, 
carve  or  paint  their  verses  and  achieve  an  amazing 
degree  of  plastic  precision.  "  The  first  concern  of 
the  man  who  writes  in  prose  or  verse,"  says  Leconte 
de  Lisle,  "  should  be  to  set  in  relief  the  picturesque 
side  of  outer  objects."  Perhaps  Heredia  is  the  last 
distinguished  figure  in  this  group  of  ciseleiirs.  And 
then,  after  this  precise  evocation  of  forms  and  colors 
by  the  great  virtuosos  of  description,  there  arises  a 
craving  for  the  infinitude  of  musical  revery  that  finds 
expression  in  the  symbolistic  movement,  in  writers 
like  Verlaine  or  Mallarm6  ("music  above  all,"  says  ^ 
Verlaine,  in  the  first  line  of  the  poem  that  is  taken 
to  be;  the  credo  of  the  school).  Mallarm6  indulges  in 
confusions  of  music  and  poetry  that  rival  in  extrava- 
gance what  one  finds  a  century  earlier  in  Germany 
in  the  theory  of  Novalis  and  the  practice  of  Tieck.' 
An  interesting  problem  arises  at  this  point :  what 
is  the  difference  between  the  legitimate  music  of  \ 
verse  and  the  music  it  attains  by  trespassing  on  the 

'  Cf.,  for  example,  the  symphony  in  words  published  by  Mal- 
larme  in  the  defunct  review  Cosmopolis,  vol.  vi,  pp.  417-427, 
with  the  "  overture  "  to  Tieck's  comedy  Die  verkehrte  Welt. 

[15s] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

domain  of  a  sister  art  ?  In  one  sense  no  poets  ever 
strove  harder  to  write  harmoniously  than  the  neo- 
classic  poets  in  France,  beginning  with  Malherbe. 
In  his  commentary  on  Desportes,  Malherbe  shows 
himself  an  extraordinarily  minute  technician,  and  in 
nothing  more  than  in  this  very  matter  of  poetical 
harmony.  He  not  only  attacks  hiatus,  but  rules  out 
various  combinations  of  vowels  and  consonants  as 
being  unmusical.  The  third-rate  Waller  enjoyed  an 
almost  first-rate  reputation  for  having  done  for  Eng- 
lish poetry,  as  it  was  supposed,  what  Malherbe  did  for 
French,'  for  having  polished  English  numbers  and 
taught  them  to  "  flow  sweetly."  La  Fontaine,  one 
of  the  most  consummate  technicians  in  verse  who 
ever  lived,  profited  by  Malherbe's  teachings.  The 
best  English  example  of  verse  that  is  musical  in  the 
sense  I  have  just  been  defining,  musical,  that  is,  by 
the  subtle  blending  of  vowels  and  consonants  so  as 
to  avoid  even  the  suspicion  of  cacophony,  is  prob- 
ably Gray's  "  Elegy."  Evidently  the  poet  can  do 
more  than  Gray  has  done,  that  is,  transcend  the 

'  In  Soame's  translation  of  Boileau's  Art poitiqiie  (revised  by 
Dryden)  Waller  is  substituted  for  Malherbe  and  praised  for  hav- 
ing "  chang&d  hard  discord  to  soft  harmony." 

I  156] 


WORD-PAINTING 

special  harmony  of  his  own  art  and  attain  the  har- 
mony of  the  musician,  only  by  superinducing  revery, 
by  resorting  to  all  the  arts  of  suggestion.  In  "  The 
Bells,"  for  example,  the  iteration  is  intended  to  cast 
an  almost  hypnotic  spell'  upon  the  mind.  In  this 
poem  Poe  is  already  standing  on  the  dangerous  outer 
edge  of  what  poetry  can  safely  do.  Mallarme,  and 
other  French  admirers  of  Poe,  attempted  to  push  on 
still  further  toward  the  Eldorado  of  musical  sug- 
gestiveness,  and  in  the  attempt  tumbled  into  chaos.^ 
We  should  perhaps  add  that  so-called  poetical 
prose  may  arise  not  only  from  confusing  prose  with 
poetry,  but  also  from  a  reaching  out  of  prose  toward 
the  domains  of  painting  or  music.    One  of  the  first 

*  In  attempting  to  cast  this  spell  the  musically  suggestive  poet 
may  fall  into  what  from  the  point  of  view  of  ordinary  poetical 
harmony  is  horrible  cacophony.  A  good  example  is  Tieck's 
U-Romance  of  Sir  Wulf,  who  is  carried  off  by  the  devil.  As 
Brandes  says  {Romantic  School  in  Germany,  p.  119):  "When 
the  reader's  nerves  have  been  narcotized  for  half  an  hour  [by 
this  repetition  of  one  vowel],  when  nothing  but  u-tu-tu  is  sounding 
in  his  ears,  he  has  reached  the  climax,  language  has  become 
music,  and  he  floats  off  on  the  stream  of  an  emotional  mood." 

^  One  should  not  overlook  the  encouragement  that  both  the 
theory  and  practice  of  Wagner  gave  the  French  decadents  in  their 
confounding  of  music  and  poetry.  Cf.  J.  Combarieu,  Les  rapports 
de  la  musique  et  de  la  poesie,  pp.  341-343. 

[157] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

examples  of  poetical  prose  in  English,  as  something 
distinct  from  imaginative  prose,  is  "  Ossian,"  where 
this  effect  is  attained  by  a  somewhat  crude  mixture 
of  the  diction  and  cadences  of  poetry  with  those  of 
prose.  Far  more  truly  romantic  is  the  poetic  prose 
of  De  Quincey,  with  its  striving  to  suggest  the  har- 
monies of  music.  Leslie  Stephen  remarks  that  "  the 
most  exquisite  passages  in  De  Quincey's  writing  are 
all  more  or  less  attempts  to  carry  out  the  idea  ex- 
pressed in  the  title  of  the  dream-fugue.  They  are 
intended  to  be  musical  compositions,  in  which  words 
have  to  play  the  part  of  notes." 

Other  writers  of  prose  might  be  mentioned  who 
are  poetical  by  their  intense  pictorial  suggestiveness. 
Poetic  prose  of  the  romantic  type  arises,  like  all 
other  romantic  confusions,  from  a  stress  of  emotion 
that  tends  to  overflow  all  formal  boundaries  ;  in  its 
more  refined  forms  it  is  the  direct  outcome  of  what 
I  have  called  the  dalliance  of  soul  and  sense  in  the 
tower  of  ivory.  "  Who  of  us,"  says  Gautier,  "  has 
not  dreamed  of  the  miracle  of  poetic  prose/  musical 

'  We  should  note  that  Rousseau's  Pygmalion,  one  of  the  ear- 
liest examples  in  French  of  poetic  prose  in  the  modern  sense,  is  a 
product  of  musical  revery. 

[158] 


PROGRAMME   MUSIC 

without  rhythm  and  rhyme,  sufficiently  flexible  to 
adapt  itself  to  the  lyrical  impulses  of  the  soul,  the 
undulations  of  revery  ?  "  And  he  finds  this  miracle 
realized  in  the  "Petits  poemes  en  prose"  of  Baude- 
laire, which,  in  their  power  to  produce  upon  us  "  the 
sensation  of  a  magnetic  sleep  that  transports  us  far 
away  from  the  real  world,"  are  comparable  to  the 
music  of  Weber.' 

We  have  thus  far  been  chiefly  studying  the  way 
in  which  the  literature  of  the  last  century  has  turned 
to  account  all  the  resources  of  suggestion,  in  its 
attempts  to  do  the  work  of  music  and  painting. 
Something  should  be  said  at  this  point  of  the  eager- 
ness that  music  has  displayed  during  the  same  period 
to  become  poetical  and  pictorial.  For  music,  so  far 
from  showing  a  humdrum  and  homekeeping  spirit, 
has  kept  pace  with  the  other  arts  in  its  restless 
striving  away  from  its  own  centre  toward  that  doubt- 
ful periphery  where  it  is  on  the  point  of  passing  over 
into  something  else. 

2.     PROGRAMME    MUSIC 

I  take  up  with  some  trepidation  the  subject  of 
programme  music  partly  because  of  my  own  incom- 

*  Introduction  to  Les  Fleurs  du  tnal  of  Baudelaire. 
[159] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

petence,  partly  because  of  the  atmosphere  of  con- 
troversy that  surrounds  the  whole  subject.  There 
is  no  agreement  even  in  the  definitions.  Thus  the 
"  Oxford  History  "  defines  programme  music  (espe- 
cially as  developed  by  Berlioz  and  Liszt)  as  "a 
curious  hybrid,  i.  e.,  music  posing  as  an  unsatis- 
factory kind  of  poetry."  '  Another  authority  makes 
his  definition  so  broad  as  to  conclude  that  "pro- 
gramme music  is  the  only  high-class  music."  *  How- 
ever defined,  programme  music  enters  into  our 
present  subject  because  it  shows  most  clearly  the 
drift  of  music  along  with  the  other  arts  toward  im- 
pressionism. Indeed,  the  development  of  music  dur- 
ing the  last  century  has  simply  followed,  usually  at 
a  considerable  interval,  the  literary  development. 
For  example,  much  of  the  music  of  Richard  Strauss 
and  Debussy  reflects  moods  that  would  already 
seem  somewhat  antiquated  if  expressed  in  literature. 
In  music  as  elsewhere  the  nineteenth  century  was 
a  period  of  vast  and  confused  expansion.  The  virtues 
that  were  in  request  were  the  expansive  virtues,  not 
those  of  concentration. 

'  Oxford  History  of  Music,  vol.  vi  (by  E.  Dannreuther),  p.  HI. 
*  Programme  Afusic,  by  Frederick  Niecks,  p.  537. 

[i6o] 


PROGRAMME  MUSIC 

We  can  easily  trace  the  connection  between  mod- 
ernism in  music  and  the  type  of  emotional  expan- 
sion I  have  associated  with  Rousseau ;  all  the  more 
easily  in  that  Rousseau  was  a  composer  and  a  theorist 
about  music,  as  well  as  a  man  of  letters.  In  music, 
as  in  other  fields,  we  can  see  him  making  his  pro- 
test, in  the  name  of  freshness  and  spontaneity, 
against  everything  formal  and  disciplinary.  In  music, 
as  in  other  fields,  we  can  see  the  gradual  yielding  of 
the  humanistic  and  religious  points  of  view  to  the 
point  of  view  of  the  sentimental  naturalist ;  the 
same  growing  emphasis  on  the  individual,  the  char- 
acteristic, the  expressive;  the  same  tendency  to 
confuse  the  original  with  the  bizarre,  the  paradoxir 
cal,  the  eccentric.  Just  as  the  romantic  writer 
seeks  to  preserve  the  innocence  of  the  mind,  and 
the  romantic  painter  the  innocence  of  the  eye,, 
so  the  romantic  musician  strives  to  preserve  the 
innocence  of  the  ear,  which  often  means  in  practice 
an  ignorance  of  the  great  traditions  of  his  art  and 
an  absence  of  serious  reflection.  Perhaps  no  one 
pushed  this  notion  of  originality  farther  than  certain 
Russian  composers.  In  his  eagerness  to  get  away 
from  the  conventional  and  the  artificial,  the  romaor 
[  i6i  ] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

tic  musician  runs  the  same  risk  as  the  romantic 
writer  of  getting  away  at  the  same  time  from  the 
normal,  the  representative,  the  human.  There  is 
the  same  complacent  inbreeding  in  music  as  in  lit- 
erature, not  only  of  personal  but  of  local  and  national 
peculiarities.  When  Grieg  was  advised  to  make  his 
next  sonata  less  Norwegian,  he  replied  defiantly, 
"  On  the  contrary,  the  next  shall  be  more  so."  Local 
color  triumphed  both  in  the  nationalist  form  (as  in 
Weber's  "  Freischiitz,"  1821),  and  in  the  quest  of 
the  strange  and  exotic  (as  in  Felicien  David's  "  Le 
Desert,"  1844).  Above  all  music  has  set  itself  to 
rendering  the  modern  mood  par  excellence,  —  the 
mood  of  melting  into  outer  nature.  Music  also  re- 
flects the  suggestive  interaction  of  all  the  sense- 
impressions  upon  one  another.  Schumann  sought 
to  give  musical  expression  to  Cologne  Cathedral; 
Richard  Strauss  to  Nietzsche's  philosophy  ;  Liszt 
to  a  poem  of  Hugo's  or  Schiller's ;  Huber  set  out 
to  orchestrate  one  of  Arnold  Bocklin's  pictures. 
Bocklin  in  turn  had  aimed  in  this  picture  to  write 
with  colors  a  "pantheistic  nature-poem."  We  can 
thus  follow  the  impressionistic  ricochet  from  one 
art  to  the  other.  Music  comes  to  be  less  inter- 
[162] 


PROGRAMME   MUSIC 

ested  in  its  own  proper  harmonies  than  in  working 
miracles  of  suggestiveness,  — in  painting  tone-pic- 
tures, in  writing  tone-poems,  or  symphonic  odes  and 
ballads,  in  telling  instrumental  tales. 

The  common  element  in  all  the  musical  tendencies 
just  enumerated  may  be  summed  up  with  sufficient 
accuracy  as  an  increasing  emphasis  on  musical  ex- 
pression as  compared  with  musical  form.  Every  one 
would  probably  agree  that  as  a  result  of  this  modern 
movement  music  has  become  vastly  more  expressive  ; 
it  has  attained  in  full  measure  the  kind  of  spontane- 
ity I  have  defined  in  speaking  of  Rousseau — whether 
this  spontaneity  appear  in  the  rendering  of  the  ele- 
mentary moods  of  the  folk,  as  often  in  Grieg,  or  in 
the  rendering  with  lyrical  intensity  of  the  moods  of 
the  individual,  as  in  Schumann  and  Chopin,  who 
were  as  spontaneous  in  their  own  way  as  Heine  and 
Shelley  in  theirs.  As  I  have  already  said,  in  following 
out  their  spontaneity  the  romantic  musicians  were 
led,  like  the  romantic  writers,  to  a  confused  emo- 
tional synthesis,  to  feel  correspondencies  between 
man  and  outer  nature,  as  well  as  between  the  dif- 
ferent sense -impressions  among  themselves;  and 
therefore  to  interpret  everything  in  terms  of  every- 
[  163  ] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

thing  else  through  suggestion.  The  increased  ex- 
pressiveness of  modern  music  has  largely  meant  in 
practice  that  music  has  become  more  suggestive ; 
and  both  the  use  and  abuse  of  this  new  suggestive- 
ness  appear  most  clearly  in  programme  music. 

It  is  a  striking  fact  not  sufiQciently  noticed  by  his- 
torians of  music  that,  in  a  passage  I  have  already 
quoted  (page  123),  Rousseau  not  only  emphasizes  the 
suggestive  power  of  music  as  no  one  perhaps  had 
done  before  him,  but  gives  a  definition  of  programme 
music  that  is  possibly  still  unsurpassed,  adding  con- 
crete examples  of  the  things  that  music  may  suggest. 
In  view  of  Rousseau's  great  influence  in  Germany 
the  programmatic  symphony  entitled  "  Portrait  mu- 
sical de  la  nature,"  published  by  J.  H.  Knecht  in 
1784,  may  have  been  an  attempt  to  put  in  practice 
some  of  Rousseau's  ideas  ;  and  Knecht's  programme 
in  turn  probably  had  some  influence  on  Beethoven  , 
in  the  composition  of  his  "  Pastoral  Symphony." 
Rousseau  aimed  to  express  the  dream  of  pastoral 
simplicity  in  both  his  music  and  his  writing,  but  it  is 
only  in  his  writing  that  he  was  fully  successful.  The 
Arcadian  revcry  that  is  the  soul  of  all  that  is  most 
poetical  in  Rousseau  does  not  attain  full  musical 
[164]  ii 

M 
I 


PROGRAMME   MUSIC 

expression  until  Beethoven's  "  Pastoral  Symphony," 
or  full  expression  in  painting  until  the  landscapes 
of  Corot.  In  rendering  suggestively  the  sights  and 
sounds  of  outer  nature  Beethoven  apparently  had 
some  uneasiness  as  to  the  peril  of  thus  working  away 
from  the  centre  of  his  art  —  from  absolute  music 
—  toward  its  frontiers.  He  wrote  in  the  sub-title 
of  one  of  the  copies  of  the  "  Pastoral  Symphony"  : 
"  Expressive  of  feeling  rather  than  painting."  And 
in  one  of  his  note-books  we  read  :  "  All  painting 
in  instrumental  music  if  pushed  too  far  is  a  failure." 
We  may  agree  with  him,  however,  that  he  has  not 
overstepped  the  proper  bounds  in  the  "  Pastoral 
Symphony."  But  it  could  hardly  be  expected  that 
the  Titans  of  the  romantic  movement  would  pre- 
serve this  balance  between  musical  form  and  the 
yearning  for  an  ampler  expression.  They  tend  to  run 
together  emotionally  music  and  the  other  arts,  after 
the  fashion  we  have  already  observed  in  literature. 

We  may  take  as  an  example  of  this  emotional 
unrestraint  and  at  the  same  time  of  the  romantic 
personality  par  excellence,  Hector  Berlioz,  who  hap- 
pens also  to  be,  with  the  possible  exception  of  Liszt, 
the  most  important  figure  in  the  history  of  pro- 
[165] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

gramme  music.  We  should  note,  first  of  all,  the 
weakness  of  Berlioz  and  in  general  of  the  whole 
modern  school  in  devotional  music,  in  the  expression 
of  what  is  above  the  reason  with  the  accompanying 
sense  of  awe  and  elevation  and  restraint.  Thus  the 
**  Requiem  Mass,"  composed  by  Berlioz  in  1836-37, 
is  mainly  noise  and  sensationalism.  According  to 
Dannreuther,  "no  such  volume  of  sound  had  been 
heard  in  Paris  since  the  taking  of  the  Bastille,"  '  — 
enough  to  raise  the  dead  instead  of  contributing  to 
their  repose. 

What  we  evidently  have  in  Berlioz  is  not  an  illu- 
mination from  above,  but  an  insurrection  from  be- 
low, and  he  is  most  himself  in  what  may  be  termed 
insurrectional  music, —  for  instance,  the  Orgy  of 
Brigands  {allegro freneticd)  in  his  "  Harold  en  Italie." 
Berlioz  has  the  true  romantic  instinct  for  attitudiniz- 
ing :  he  pushes  himself  to  the  front  of  the  stage,  and 
proceeds  to  paint  and  act  what  was  most  intense  in 
his  own  emotional  life.  He  was  thus  led  to  compose 
the  most  famous  of  his  pieces  of  programme  music, 
the  "  Symphonie  fantastique  "  {Episode  de  la  vie  d'nn 
artiste).    What  the  episode  was  we  may  infer  from 

'  Oxford  History  of  Music,  vol.  vi,  p.  174. 
[166] 


PROGRAMME  MUSIC 

the  passages  in  his  journal  where  he  supplements 
his  musical  confession.  He  there  tells  of  his  "  in- 
fernal passion "  for  the  English  or  rather  Irish 
actress,  Miss  Henrietta  Smithson,  that  led  to  the 
following  scene  between  them  :  — 

"  She  reproached  me  with  not  loving  her.  There- 
upon, tired  of  all  this,  I  answered  her  by  poisoning 
myself  before  her  eyes.  Terrible  cries  of  Henrietta. 
Sublime  despair !  Atrocious  laughter  on  my  part. 
Desire  to  revive  on  seeing  her  terrible  protestations 
of  love.  Emetic  !  " 

Like  his  contemporary  Hugo,  Berlioz  has  been 
accused  of  a  partiality,  if  not  for  the  ugly,  at  least 
for  the  colossal  and  the  misshapen.  To  both  the 
poet  and  the  composer  the  epithet  "  Polyphemish  " 
has  been  applied.  What  is  plain  is  that  in  many  of 
these  modern  composers  the  laws  of  structure  are 
relaxed,  and  musical  harmony  and  proportion  sac- 
rificed to  a  stormy  impressionism.  The  same  dis- 
regard for  beauty  as  compared  with  expressiveness 
which  we  have  found  in  Berlioz  is  likewise  seen  in 
Liszt,  The  strain  that  they  both  put  upon  musical 
form  is  due  to  their  desire  to  render  things  that  do 
not  come  directly  within  the  domain  of  music.  We 
[167] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

read  in  Dannreuther  :  "  In  pieces  such  as  the  firs* 
and  last  movements  of  Berlioz's  *  Symphonic  fantas- 
tique,'  the  first  and  last  movements  of  his  sym- 
phony '  Harold  en  Italic,'  Liszt's  Poemes  sympho- 
niques,  '  Ce  qu'on  entend  sur  la  montagne,'  after  a 
poem  by  Victor  Hugo,  and  'Die  Ideale,'  after  a  poem 
by  Schiller,  the  hearer  is  bewildered  by  a  series  of 
startling  orchestral  effects  which  are  not  explicable 
on  any  principle  of  musical  design."  '  This  is  so,  be- 
cause in  producing  these  effects  the  composer  was 
not  primarily  intent  on  musical  design :  he  was 
really  devising  "hieroglyphs,"  or  symbols,  that  are 
not  to  be  estimated  first  of  all  for  their  value  as 
music,  but  rather  for  their  power  to  set  one  dream- 
ing of  poetry  or  pictures,  or  history  or  drama,  or 
even  philosophy.  For  example,  what  is  the  musical 
value  of  the  crash  of  sound  with  which  Berlioz  sym- 
bolizes the  fall  of  the  axe  on  the  neck  of  the  victim 
in  his  "Marche  au  supplice  "  {"  Symphonic  fantas- 
tique  ") ;  or  of  the  piercing,  dissonant,  high  trum- 
pet note  by  which  the  fatal  sword  thrust  is  repre- 
sented in  the  tone-poem  of  Richard  Strauss,  "  Don 
Juan  "?  To  ask  such  questions  is  to  answer  them. 

'   Oxford  History  of  Music,  vol.  vi,  p.  1 1. 

[i68] 


PROGRAMME   MUSIC 

Besides,  musical  suggestiveness  is  even  more  un- 
certain and  subjective  than  suggestiveness  in  litera- 
ture. We  read  of  two  persons  who,  on  hearing 
one  of  Schubert's  marches,  had  an  almost  identi- 
cal vision  of  eighteenth-century  Spain.  But  it  is  ex- 
ceptional for  music,  unless  accompanied  by  a  very 
detailed  programme,  to  suggest  similar  images  to 
different  individuals.  The  constant  menace  that 
hangs  over  the  whole  ultra-impressionistic  school  is 
an  incomprehensible  symbolism.  Many  persons  will 
sympathize  with  the  man  who  waxed  enthusiastic 
over  the  way  Richard  Strauss  had  reproduced  in 
one  of  his  tone -poems  the  whistling  of  the  wind 
through  the  arms  of  a  mill,  but  was  told  that  what 
the  master  had  really  tried  to  render  in  this  passage 
was  the  bleating  of  a  flock  of  sheep !  In  general, 
primary  emphasis  on  suggestiveness  in  music  plunges 
one  into  an  abyss  of  subjectivity.  A  piece  of  music 
that  is  meaningless,  for  one,  may  be  for  another  the 
magic  key  that  unlocks  the  palace  of  dreams.  Mo- 
zart is  intrinsically  beautiful ;  but  Gerard  de  Nerval 
declares  that  he  would  give  the  whole  of  Mozart, 
and  Rossini  and  Weber  into  the  bargain,  for  a  certain 
old  tune  that  conjured  up  before  his  inner  eye  a 
[169] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

seventeenth-century  chateau  and  the  woman  he  had 
perhaps  seen  there  in  a  former  existence.' 

It  would  be  easy  enough  to  show  that  music  has 
always  been  more  or  less  programmatic  and  sugges- 
tive. The  romanticists  developed  infinitely  the  art 
of  musical  suggestiveness,  using  it  especially  to  re- 
late man  to  outer  nature,  but  they  did  not  by  any 
means  invent  it.  The  great  musicians  of  the  past 
were  not  pedants  and  formalists,  and  only  pedants 

'  The  lines  in  which  Gerard  de  Nerval  describes  the  suggestive 
power  of  music  are  worth  quoting  for  their  poetical  charm  and 
suggestiveness :  — 

FANTAISIE 

II  est  un  air  pour  qui  je  donnerais 
Tout  Rossini,  tout  Mozart,  tout  Weber, 
Un  air  trhs  vieux,  languissant  et  funebre, 
Qui  pour  moi  seul  a  des  charmes  secrets. 

Or,  chaque  fois  que  je  viens  k  I'entendre, 

De  deux  cents  ans  mon  ame  rajeunit ; 

C'est  sous  Louis  treize  .  .  .  et  je  crois  voir  s'dtendre 

Un  coteau  vert  que  le  couchant  jaunit. 

Puis  un  chateau  de  brique  i  coins  de  pierres, 
Aux  vitraux  teints  de  rougeitres  couleurs, 
Ceint  de  grands  pares,  avec  une  riviire 
Baignant  ses  pieds,  qui  couk  entre  les  fleurs. 

Puis  une  dame  k  sa  haute  fenetre, 

Blonde,  aux  yeux  noirs,  en  ses  habits  anciens  ,  .  . 

Que  dans  une  autre  existence,  peut-etre, 

J'ai  d6]k  vue !  .  .  .  et  dont  je  me  souviens. 

[    170] 


PROGRAMME  MUSIC 

and  formalists  would  desire  music  so  "absolute  "  as 
to  exclude  entirely  poetical  and  pictorial  suggestion. 
In  itself  suggestion  in  music,  though  even  more 
difficult  than  in  literature,  is,  if  successful,  delight- 
ful and  legitimate.  But  even  if  successful  the  ques- 
tion remains  with  what  measure  it  is  employed  and 
to  what  purpose.  Many  modern  musicians  have  laid 
themselves  open  to  the  charge  of  being  expressive 
but  aimless.  They  are  in  danger  of  resembling  the 
writer  of  whom  it  was  said  that  he  could  express 
anything  he  wished,  —  unluckily  he  had  nothing  to 
express ;  or  they  may  be  likened  to  a  painter  who 
is  an  accomplished  colorist  but  has  no  design.  Too 
often  they  have  reveled  in  their  colors  and  impres- 
sions without  trying  to  subordinate  them  to  anything 
higher.  They  have  displayed  the  same  intemperance 
in  this  respect  as  the  romantic  word-painters,  and 
exposed  themselves  to  the  same  criticism;  they 
have  dwelt  too  much  in  an  outlying  province  of 
their  art  instead  of  at  its  centre.  As  Sainte-Beuve 
would  say,  they  have  transferred  the  capital  of  music 
from  Rome  to  Byzantium  ;  and  when  the  capital  of 
an  empire  is  thus  pushed  over  to  its  extreme  fron- 
tier it  is  very  close  to  the  barbarians.   Moreover, 


THE  NEW   LAOKOON 

the  barbarism  that  menaces  modern  music  as  well 
as  the  other  arts  is  often  the  most  dangerous  kind 
— that  which  rises  from  over-refinement. 

3.     COLOR-AUDITION 

The  more  extreme  forms  of  romantic  word-paint- 
ing and  programme  music,  indeed  most  of  the  more 
extreme  forms  of  suggestiveness,  are  closely  allied 
to  color-audition.  For  example,  the  famous  tone- 
picture  of  the  dawn  in  Fclicien  David's  "  Le 
Desert"  would,  we  may  suppose,  be  more  fully  ap- 
preciated by  one  who  instinctively  relates  light 
and  sound,  —  for  whom  habitually  "the  sun  comes 
up  like  thunder."  '  The  hero  of  a  recent  novel,* 
to  whom  everything,  including  the  moral  law  and  its 
mandates,  suggests  sounds  arrayed  in  analogical 
colors,  appropriately  engages  in  composing  pro- 
gramme music.  Certain  suggestive  word-painters, 
again,  assert  that  the  vowels  have  for  them  distinct 

'  Compare  with  Kipling's  phrase  Baudelaire's  description  of 
the  rising  sun  "comme  une  explosion  nous  lan9ant  son  bonjour." 
It  is  curious  to  discover  traces  of  advanced  Rousseauistic  sensi- 
bility in  a  writer  who  has  often  been  taken  as  a  type  of  Anglo- 
Saxon  sturdiness. 

*   Violett,  by  the  Baroness  von  Ilutten. 

[  172] 


COLOR-AUDITION 

colors,  and  write  for  readers  like  themselves,  — 
readers  in  the  depths  of  whose  sensibility  these 
vowels  will  reverberate  in  musical  iridescences.  The 
colored  drawings  exhibited  in  Boston  not  long  ago 
of  portions  of  Schumann's  and  Beethoven's  music  ' 
also  appear  to  imply  color-audition  in  an  acute  stage 
if  they  really  live  up  to  their  titles.  Color-audition 
indeed  seems  to  give  a  definite  physiological  basis 
to  that  running  together  of  all  the  different  impres- 
sions, that  mystical  synthetic  sense,  of  which  the 
modern  aesthete  dreams,  —  the  sense  that  "sees, 
hears,  tastes,  smells,  touches,  all  in  one."^  It  is  this 
sense,  no  doubt,  that  one  will  need  to  enjoy  Wag- 
ner's "art  work  of  the  future,"  his  Gesammthinst, 
in  which  all  the  separate  arts  are  to  melt  together 
voluptuously. 

The  latest  dictionary  of  music  dismisses  color- 
audition  curtly  by  the  remark  that  "  Rousseau's 
'Essay  on  the  Origin  of  Language,'  .  .  .  gives  the 
germ  of  subsequent  absurdities  regarding  the  alleged 
analogies  between  tones  and  colors."  ^  Rousseau  says 

'  No.  20  in  the  catalogue  I  have  of  this  collection  is  appropri- 
ately entitled  "  This  way  madness  lies." 
*  Sidney  Lanier. 
3  Stokes'  Encyclopedia  of  Musky  by  L.  J.  de  Bekker,  p.  567. 

[173] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

in  this  essay,  it  is  true,  that  "sounds  are  never  more 
effective  than  when  they  produce  the  impression 
of  colors  " ;  and  he  is  evidently  on  the  way,  like 
Diderot,  to  all  our  modern  confusions.  Yet  I  for 
one  should  hesitate  to  say  in  this  particular  matter, 
cest  la  f ante  a  Rousseau.  Locke  speaks  of  a  blind 
person  for  whom  the  sound  of  a  trumpet  was  scarlet, 
and  there  are  very  likely  earlier  references  that  have 
escaped  me.  Indeed,  if  color-audition  has  as  firm 
a  physiological  basis  as  is  sometimes  asserted,  it 
may  well  be  as  old  as  human  nature  itself.  What- 
ever we  may  think  of  color-audition  in  general,  it 
begins  to  have  literary  importance  only  with  the 
advent  of  modern  impressionism.  The  question 
naturally  arises  how  far  it  is  connected  with  the 
hypersesthesia  that  is  so  often  found  in  this  whole 
movement.  I  do  not  care  to  maintain  that  color- 
audition  is  always  a  sign  of  an  abnormally  height- 
ened sensibility.  This  is  a  question  I  prefer  to  leave 
to  the  specialists.  So  far  as  my  own  observation 
goes,  I  should  say  that  the  habit  of  interpreting 
sounds  in  terms  of  color  may  exist  without  any 
special  hypera^sthesia,  but  that  the  habit  of  inter- 
preting light  or  color  in  terms  of  sound  is  nearly 
[174] 


COLOR-AUDITION 

always  a  sign  of  nervous  disorder.  But  as  I  have 
already  said,  color-audition  has  found  literary  ex- 
pression only  in  those  who  belong  to  what  we  may 
term  the  neurotic  school.  It  manifests  itself  in  con- 
nection with  the  melomania  of  the  German  roman- 
ticists, their  tendency  not  only  to  worship  music 
but  to  reduce  to  music  all  the  other  arts.  The 
writings  of  Tieck,  for  example,  already  exhibit  it 
in  a  very  acute  form.  In  "Zerbino,"  he  writes 
of  flowers,  "  their  colors  sing,  their  forms  resound, 
.  .  .  color,  fragrance,  song,  proclaim  themselves 
one  family."  In  his  **  Magelone,"  the  music  dies 
away  "like  a  stream  of  blue  light."  In  E.  T.  A. 
Hoffmann  we  have  a  confusion  of  the  sense -im- 
pressions that  is  still  more  plainly  pathological. 
These  confusions  came  to  him  especially  in  the 
state  between  sleeping  and  waking.  On  such  occa- 
sions, he  writes,  "particularly  when  I  have  heard  a 
great  deal  of  music,  there  takes  place  in  me  a  confu- 
sion of  colors,  sounds,  and  perfumes.  It  is  as  though 
they  all  sprang  up  mysteriously  together  from  the 
same  ray  of  light  and  then  united  to  form  a  mar- 
velous concert.  The  perfume  of  dark  red  carna- 
tions acts  upon  me  with  extraordinary  and  magic 
[175] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

power.  I  fall  involuntarily  into  a  dream  state, 
and  then  hear  as  though  at  a  great  distance  the 
sound  of  a  horn  rising  and  dying  away."  In  his 
sketch  entitled  "Kreisler's  Musical,  Poetical  Club," 
he  has  attempted  to  work  out  the  correspondencies 
between  sounds  and  colors.  "  The  fragrance  "  [i.  e., 
of  the  music],  he  says  in  one  passage  in  this  sketch, 
"  shimmered  in  flaming,  mysteriously  interwoven 
circles." 

Hoffmann,  we  may  note  in  passing,  was  an 
avowed  Rousseauist.  He  writes  in  his  journal  when 
only  twenty-nine  (13  February,  1804):  "I  am 
reading  the  '  Confessions '  of  Rousseau  possibly  for 
the  thirtieth  time."  (He  had  read  them  for  the  first 
time  at  the  age  of  fourteen.)  "  I  find  that  I  am  very 
much  like  him."  Hoffmann,  indeed,  and  other  Ger- 
mans drew  the  extreme  consequences  from  Rous- 
seauism  and  thus  anticipated  the  French  decadents. 

Color-audition  and  allied  phenomena  do  not  ap- 
pear to  any  great  extent  in  the  earlier  French  ro- 
manticists. We  learn  almost  by  chance  that  Alfred 
de  Musset  associated  colors  with  sounds,  a  pecul- 
iarity that  can  scarcely  be  said  to  have  affected  his 
poetry;  though  his  poetry  contains,  of  course,  abun- 
[176] 


COLOR-AUDITION 

dant  evidence  of  hyperaesthesia.  In  a  letter  to 
Madame  Jaubert  he  writes  that  he  very  much  re- 
gretted having  to  argue  with  his  family  to  prove 
thsit/a  was  yellow,  sol  red,  a  soprano  voice  blonde, 
a  contralto  voice  brunette.  He  thought  that  these 
things  went  without  saying.  But  it  is  only  with 
Baudelaire  that  this  confusion  of  the  sense-impres- 
sions assumes  importance.  Baudelaire  dreams  of  a 
"mystical  metamorphosis  of  all  his  senses  fused 
into  one,"  and  comes  within  measurable  distance  of 
attaining  it.  For  instance,  in  the  sonnet  I  have 
already  quoted  he  says:  "There  are  perfumes  fresh 
as  the  flesh  of  babes,  sweet  as  hautboys,  green  as 
meadows,  and  others,  corrupt,  rich,  and  triumphant, 
having  the  expansiveness  of  infinite  things,  like 
amber,  musk,  benjamin,  and  incense,  which  sing  the 
transports  of  the  spirit  and  senses."  It  is  a  pity 
that  Baudelaire  did  not  also  taste  the  perfumes  in 
this  passage,  for  then  he  would  have  arrived  at  a 
complete  jumble  of  all  the  five  senses,  and  of  flesh 
and  spirit  into  the  bargain.  Baudelaire  was  always  on 
the  outlook  for  the  symbolizing  of  sound  in  color. 
Thus  we  are  told,  when  Wagner  in  person  was 
striving  to  conquer  Paris,  Baudelaire,  who  was  in 
[  ^77] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

full  sympathy  with  the  new  music,  was  invited  to 
hear  him  play  the  piano.  Wagner  began  in  a  blue 
dressing-gown  ;  after  a  time  he  changed  to  a  yellow 
gown;  and  finally  to  a  green  one.  When  he  had 
finished  Baudelaire  expressed  sincere  satisfaction 
but  added  diffidently  that  he  would  like  to  ask  a 
question.  Did  the  change  of  color  in  the  dressing- 
gown  symbolize  anything  in  the  music  ?  Wagner 
looked  sharply  to  see  if  the  Frenchman  were  mak- 
ing fun  of  him.  But  when  persuaded  of  his  good 
faith,  he  explained  that  playing  so  warmed  him  up 
that  he  had  a  change  of  gowns  from  heavier  to 
lighter  ready  to  hand ;  the  colors  were  mere  acci- 
dent.' 

Baudelaire  would  almost  seem  to  have  arrived  at 
the  "  ultimate  dim  Thule  "  of  refined  sensation ;  but 
some  of  his  disciples  pushed  on  still  further  into  the 
region  of  the  rare  and  the  remote.  We  may  take  as 
representing  this  last  stage  of  the  movement,  J.  K. 
Huy.smans,  and  his  novel  "A  Rebours "  (1884). 
In  writing  this  novel  Huysmans  was  evidently  in- 
fluenced strongly,  not  only  by  Baudelaire,  but  by 

"  I  borrow  this  anecdote  from  the  Nation  (New  York),  17  De- 
cember, 1908. 

[178] 


COLOR-AUDITION 

Poe.  It  makes  clear  to  us  indeed  why  Poe  is  the 
only  American  author  who  has  had  an  important 
influence  in  France :  he  was  the  only  American  au- 
thor who  was  not  merely  romantic,  but  ultra-roman- 
tic, who  had  the  type  of  sensibility  we  have  been 
studying  in  Rousseau  and  his  descendants.  How 
could  Baudelaire  and  his  group  fail  to  be  fascinated 
by  such  passages  as  the  one  in  the  "  Colloquy  of 
Monos  and  Una  "  where  Poe  describes  the  experi- 
ence of  a  person  who  has  already  ceased  to  breathe 
without  as  yet  having  ceased  entirely  to  feel.  "  The 
senses,  indeed,"  says  the  spirit  who  relates  this  ex- 
perience, speaking  of  course  from  another  state  of 
being,  "  the  senses  were  unusually  active  although 
eccentrically  so,  assuming  each  other's  functions  at 
random.  The  taste  and  smell  were  inextricably  con- 
founded and  became  one  sentiment,  abnormal  and 
intense.  The  rays  of  light  of  the  candles  set  in  the ' 
death-chamber  affected  me  only  as  sound.  Issuing 
from  the  flame  of  each  lamp,  for  there  were  many, 
there  flowed  unbrokenly  into  my  ears  a  strain  of 
melodious  monotone." 

Huysmans  then,  as  I  have  said,  was  inspired  to 
write  "  A  Rebours  "  not  only  by  Baudelaire,  but  by 

[  179  ] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

Poe,  —  especially  by  the  tale  entitled  "  The  Imp  of 
the  Perverse,"  and  by  the  account  Poe  gives  of  the 
habits  of  M.  Auguste  Dupin.  The  title  of  the  novel, 
"A  Rebours,"  means  that  its  hero,  Des  Esseintes, 
is  exactly  opposed  in  all  his  opinions  and  behavior 
to  the  rest  of  the  world.  His  twofold  passion  is 
first,  to  make  faces  at  the  bourgeois ;  second,  "  to 
enwrap  himself,"  as  Poe  puts  it,  "in  an  exquisite 
sense  of  the  strange."  He  reduces  life  to  art,  and 
art  to  sensation,  and  sensation  itself  to  an  endeavor 
to  achieve  in  revery  a  sort  of  musical  synthesis  of 
the  various  sense-impressions.  To  this  end  he  ar- 
ranges for  himself  in  a  lonely  suburb  of  Paris  "a 
bower  of  dreams,"  so  organized  that  he  may  play 
symphonic  variations  on  his  different  senses  and  ex- 
tract from  them  the  maximum  of  refined  enjoyment. 
For  example,  Des  Esseintes  built  into  the  wall  of 
his  dining-room  a  cupboard  containing  a  series  of 
small  kegs  arranged  side  by  side,  and  each  having 
a  little  silver  spigot  at  the  bottom.  He  connects 
these  spigots  with  one  another  so  as  to  form  a 
kind  of  key-board  on  which  he  can  play  his  mouth- 
organ.  "The  organ  happened  to  be  open.  The 
little  drawers  labeled  flute,  horn,  roix  c<flcstc,  were 
[  i8o] 


COLOR-AUDITION 

drawn  out  ready  to  be  operated.  Des  Esseintes 
drank  a  drop  here  and  there,  played  inner  sympho- 
nies for  himself,  succeeded  in  procuring  for  himself 
in  his  throat  sensations  analogous  to  those  that 
music  pours  into  the  ear."  Furthermore,  every 
liqueur  corresponds  in  taste,  according  to  Des  Es- 
seintes, to  the  sound  of  a  musical  instrument.  Cura- 
sao corresponds  to  the  clarinet;  kiimmel  to  the 
nasal  oboe  ;  mint  and  anisette  to  the  flute,  both  pep- 
pery and  sweet ;  kirsch  to  the  fierce  blast  of  a  trum- 
pet ;  gin  and  whiskey  to  strident  cornets  and  trom- 
bones, etc.  Moreover,  tonal  relations  exist  in  the 
music  of  lique?irs.  Thus  the  benedictine  stands  as 
the  relative  minor  of  that  major  of  alcohols  known 
as  green  chartreuse. 

"  These  principles  once  admitted,  Des  Esseintes 
had  succeeded,  thanks  to  erudite  experiments,  in 
playing  upon  his  tongue  silent  melodies,  mute  fu- 
nereal marches  grandly  spectacular;  in  hearing  in 
his  mouth  solos  of  mint,  duos  of  vespetro  and  rum." 

But   that    evening,  Huysmans    concludes,    Des 

Esseintes  had  no  desire  to  "  listen  to  the  taste  of 

music."  He  does,  however,  indulge  himself  later  in 

a  concert  of  perfumes ;  each  perfume  evoking  for 

[i8i] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

his  inner  eye  its  appropriate  vision.  Des  Esseintes 
speaks  confidently  of  these  correspondencies  as 
being  generally  valid.  But  is  this  the  case  ?  Can 
the  same  perfume  be  counted  on  to  suggest  the 
same  vision  to  any  two  persons,  or  indeed  to  suggest 
anything  at  all  ?  This  is  the  crux  of  the  whole  mat- 
ter. In  1902  there  was  given  at  New  York  in  the 
Carnegie  Lyceum  the  "  first  experimental  perfume 
concert  in  America,"  which  included  among  its  at- 
tractions "  a  trip  to  Japan  in  sixteen  minutes,"  con- 
veyed to  the  audience  by  a  series  of  odors.  But  any 
attempt  of  this  kind  to  arrive  at  a  collective  bower 
of  dreams,  to  have  a  whole  audience  respond  in 
a  similar  manner  to  olfactory  suggestiveness  is 
foredoomed  to  failure.  It  is  likely  to  appeal  not  to 
the  audience's  sense  of  smell,  but  to  a  far  more 
wholesome  sense,  —  its  sense  of  humor.  And  this 
I  understand  is  what  happened  in  the  New  York 
experiment. 

A  like  attempt  to  suggest  colors  by  sounds  or 
vice  versa  would  have  the  same  fate.  These  sup- 
posed correspondencies  are  involved  in  hopeless 
subjectivity.  If  we  go  through  the  testimony  of 
people  in  the  habit  of  seeing  sounds  and  hearing 
[182] 


COLOR-AUDITION 

colors,  we  shall  find  that  to  one  the  flute  seemed 
red,  to  another  sky-blue ;  for  one  the  trumpet  was 
scarlet,  for  another  green,  and  so  on.  In  his  cele- 
brated sonnet  Arthur  Rimbaud  declares  that  the 
vowel  a  is  black,  e  white,  i  red,  u  green,  o  blue.' 
To  Ren6  Ghil,  however,  the  vowels  suggest  very 
different  colors,  o^  as  he  maintains,  being  not  blue 
but  red;  a  point  disputed  by  these  "exquisite  in- 
valids," as  Anatole  France  calls  them,  "  under  the 
indulgent  eye  of  M.  Mallarme."  Here  as  elsewhere 
the  last  stage  of  romantic  suggestiveness  is  an  in- 
comprehensible symbolism.  Attempts  such  as  were 
made  at  Paris  a  few  years  ago  to  found  a  school 
of  art  on  color-audition  must  remain  forever  vain. 
Color-audition  and  similar  phenomena  have  little 
bearing  on  the  higher  and  more  humane  purposes 
of  art.  For  the  critic  of  art  and  literature  they  are 
interesting  and  curious,  but  scarcely  anything  more. 
They  concern  more  immediately  the  student  of 
psychology  and  medicine,  and  in  some  cases  the 
nerve-specialist. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  the  hero  of  Huysmans,  after 

'  A  noir,  E  blanc,  I  rouge,  U  vert,  O  bleu,  voyelles, 
Je  dirai  quelque  jour  vos  naissances  latentes,  etc. 

[  183  1 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

all  his  "erudite  experiments"  on  himself,  finally 
collapses  at  the  close  of  the  book  into  the  arms  of 
a  nerve-specialist.  In  himself  Des  Esseintes  is,  as 
M.  Lemaitre  remarks,  only  a  "very  complicated 
ass  "  ;  but  he  is  more  than  usually  significant  in  his 
asininity.  Des  Esseintes  is  a  suitable  symbol  of  the 
end  of  an  art  that  refuses  to  go  beyond  the  quest  of 
sensation,  and  seeks  to  enhance  this  sensation  by 
throwing  over  it  the  glamour  of  imaginative  illusion. 
As  marking  the  supreme  exaggerations  of  his  school, 
his  mouth-organ  is  equally  symptomatic,  as  I  have 
■said  elsewhere,  with  the  color-clavichord  of  Father 
Castel.  In  reducing  everything  to  suggestion  Des 
Esseintes  merely  expresses  in  his  own  way  what  is 
more  and  more  a  universal  tendency.  We  are  living 
in  an  age  that  has  gone  mad  on  the  powers  of  sug- 
gestion in  everything  from  its  art  to  its  therapeu- 
tics. Even  the  art  of  dancing  has  caught  the 
contagion,  and  is  not  content  to  count  simply  as  dan- 
cing but  must  needs  be  a  symbol  and  suggestion  of 
something  else,  of  a  Greek  vase,  for  example,  or  a 
Beethoven  symphony.  If  all  the  arts  are  thus  rest- 
less and  impressionistic,  the  reason  is  not  far  to 
seek :  it  is  because  the  people  who  practice  these 
[184] 


COLOR-AUDITION 

arts  and  for  whom  they  are  practiced  are  themselves 
living  in  an  impressionistic  flutter.  If  the  arts  lack 
dignity,  centrality,  repose,  it  is  because  the  men  of 
the  present  have  no  centre,  no  sense  of  anything 
fixed  or  permanent  either  within  or  without  them- 
selves, that  they  may  oppose  to  the  flux  of  pheno- 
mena and  the  torrent  of  impressions.  In  a  word,  if 
confusion  has  crept  into  the  arts,  it  is  merely  a 
special  aspect  of  a  more  general  malady,  of  that 
excess  of  sentimental  and  scientific  naturaUsm '  from 
which,  if  my  diagnosis  is  correct,  the  occidental 
world  is  now  suffering.  It  remains,  therefore,  for  us 
to  consider  whether  there  is  any  means  by  which 
we  may  react  in  just  measure  against  this  naturalism, 
—  by  which  we  may  recover  humanistic  standards 
without  ceasing  to  be  vital  and  spontaneous,  or  in 
any  way  reverting  to  formalism.  I 

-      '  I  have  attempted  a  definition  of  these  terms  in  Literature  and 
\  the  American  College.    (Essay  on  "  Bacon  and  Rousseau.") 


CHAPTER   VII 
CONCLUSION 

I.    THE    LIMITS    OF    NATURALISM 

The  theories  about  art  and  literature  that  we  have 
been  reviewing  in  this  book  seem  in  the  retrospect 
a  sort  of  oscillation  between  extremes :  we  have  seen 
the  impressionistic  extreme  follow  the  extreme  of 
formalism,  the  pseudo-Platonists  succeed  the  pseudo- 
Aristotelians  ;  we  have  seen  the  neo  -  classicists 
confuse  the  arts  objectively  (usually  in  terms  of 
painting),  and  the  romanticists  confuse  them  sub- 
jectively (frequently  in  terms  of  music).  "It  is  the 
privilege  of  the  ancients,"  says  Lessing,  "  never  in 
any  matter  to  do  too  much  or  too  little."  Man  is 
fond  of  looking  on  himself  as  a  lover  of  the  truth ; 
but  in  tracing  historically  a  subject  like  the  present 
we  are  often  tempted  to  pronounce  him  rather  a 
lover  of  half-truths.  Of  course  most  men  cannot  be 
said  to  love  in  any  effective  sense  even  half-truths, 
but  arc  hungry  above  all  for  illusions.  Nor  do  the 
[i86] 


THE   LIMITS   OF   NATURALISM 

illusions  need  to  be  very  complicated,  —  the  sim- 
plest illusions  of  sense  usually  suffice.  A  little  van- 
ity and  a  little  sensuality,  says  a  disdainful  French 
moralist,  is  about  all  that  enters  into  the  make-up 
of  the  average  man.  Even  so  there  is  something  to 
be  said  for  the  point  of  view  of  the  average  man. 
He  often  derives  more  satisfaction  from  his  frank 
surrender  to  the  illusions  of  life,  —  to  what  Erasmus 
would  have  called  his  folly,  —  than  the  philosopher 
from  his  painful  gropings  for  the  truth.  "  In  Folly's 
cup  still  laughs  the  bubble  Joy." 

If  the  philosopher  does  win  a  glimpse  of  some- 
thing beyond  the  almost  impenetrable  veil  of  illu- 
sion, he  is  liable  to  take  for  the  truth  what  is  at  best 
only  a  half-truth,  and  so  grows  one-sided  and  fanati- 
cal. The  half-truth  often  gets  itself  formulated  and 
imposed  tyrannically  upon  the  world,  and  men  con- 
tinue to  hold  fast  to  it  long  after  it  has  served  its 
purpose,  when  emphasis  is  needed  rather  on  some 
opposite  aspect  of  the  truth.  This  is  a  chief  form  of 
that  blindness  in  human  nature  that  the  great  Greek 
poets  saw  so  clearly,  —  the  desperate  tenacity  with 
which  men  cling  to  their  half-truths  and  fail  to  see 
the  approaching  shadow  of  Nemesis.  Indeed,  one 
[187] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

might  say  in  this  sense  that  it  would  be  easy  enough 
for  man  to  guard  against  his  vices  if  he  could  only 
be  saved  from  the  excess  of  his  virtues. 

The  tenacity  with  which  man  clings  to  his  half- 
truths  is  due  not  merely  to  conviction  but  also  to 
supineness.  Man  has  always  been  ready  to  justify 
his  exclusive  allegiance  to  the  half-truth  that  hap- 
pens to  be  in  fashion  by  some  one  of  the  innumer- 
able sophistries  by  which  he  has  flattered  his  ancient 
indolence.  In  fact,  as  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds  says, 
there  is  scarcely  any  expedient  to  which  man  will  not 
resort  in  order  to  "  evade  and  shuffle  off  real  labor, 
—  the  real  labor  of  thinking."  Sir  Joshua  showed 
that  he  himself  was  on  his  guard  against  the  neo- 
classical supineness  when  he  says  that  he  avoided 
making  copies,  because  making  copies  "  requires  no 
effort  of  mind  "  and  gets  one  into  the  "dangerous 
habit  of  imitating  without  selecting,  and  laboring 
without  a  determinate  object."  For  the  neo-classical 
indolence  of  mechanical  imitation  the  romanticist 
substituted  the  indolence  of  revery  —  of  a  sponta- 
neity that  has  only  to  let  itself  go.  Wordsworth 
would  have  us  believe  that  to  become  wise  a  man 
needs  merely  to  sit  down  on  an  "  old  gray  stone  " 
[188] 


THE   LIMITS   OF   NATURALISM 

and  "dream  his  time  away."  And  Wordsworth  of 
course  ghmpses  here  an  important  half-truth,  but  a 
half-truth  at  least  as  dangerous  in  itself  as  the  neo- 
classic  half-truth  about  the  copying  of  models. 
Moreover,  the  romantic  indolence  resembles  the  neo- 
classic  indolence  in  having  no  "determinate  object" 
and  in  not  being  truly  selective. 

Man  is  therefore  a  living  paradox  in  that  he  holds 
with  enthusiasm  and  conviction  to  the  half-truth 
and  yet  becomes  perfect  only  in  proportion  as  he 
achieves  the  rounded  view.  The  essence  of  any  true 
humanistic  method  is  the  mediation  between  ex- 
tremes, a  mediation  that  demands  of  course  not  only 
effective  thinking  but  effective  self-discipline ;  and 
that,  no  doubt,  is  why  true  humanists  have  always 
been  so  rare.  We  are  not  to  suppose  that  because  a 
man  has  made  some  progress  in  mediating  between 
opposite  virtues  and  half-truths  he  has  therefore 
arrived  at  the  truth.  The  Truth  (with  a  capi- 
tal T)  is  of  necessity  infinite  and  so  is  not  for  any 
poor  finite  creature  like  man.  The  most  any  man 
^  can  do  is  to  tend  toward  the  truth,  but  the  portion 
of  it  he  has  achieved  at  any  given  moment  will  al- 
ways, compared  with  what  still  remains,  be  a  mere 
[189] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

glimpse  and  an  infinitesimal  fragment.  If  he  at- 
tempts to  formulate  this  glimpse,  the  danger  is  that 
it  will  thus  be  frozen  into  a  false  finality.  Any  one 
who  thinks  he  has  got  the  Truth  finally  tucked  away 
in  a  set  of  formulae,  is  merely  suffering,  whether  he 
call  himself  theologian,  or  scientist,  or  philosopher, 
from  what  may  be  termed  the  error  of  intellectual- 
ism  or  the  metaphysical  illusion.  But  though  the 
truth  cannot  be  finally  formulated,  man  cannot  dis- 
pense with  formulae.  The  truth  will  always  over- 
flow his  categories,  yet  he  needs  categories.  He 
should  therefore  have  formulae  and  categories,  but 
hold  them  fluidly ;  in  other  words,  he  must  have 
standards,  but  they  must  be  flexible ;  he  must  have 
faith  in  law,  but  it  must  be  a  vital  faith. 

The  neo-classic  theorists  whom  we  studied  in  the 
early  part  of  this  book  evidently  had  a  faith  in  law 
that  was  too  stark  and  literal ;  in  a  world  of  flux  and 
relativity  they  tried  to  set  up  changeless  formulas. 
Boilcau,  for  example,  speaks  of  the  literary  ^rwr^j  as 
though  they  were  fixed  from  everlasting  to  everlast- 
ing. Lessing,  again,  shows  too  rigid  a  sense  of  law 
when  he  asserts  that  Aristotle's  "  Poetics  "  is  as  in- 
fallible as  Euclid  ;  he  should  at  least  have  allowed 
[  190] 


THE   LIMITS   OF   NATURALISM 

for  the  possibilities  of  non-Euclidean  geometry.  Less- 
ing's  perception  of  the  laws  of  the  drama,  though 
too  rigidly  formulated,  is  in  its  own  way  vital,  whereas 
what  we  found  in  many  earlier  Aristotelians  was  a 
somewhat  Jesuitical  revamping  of  the  theological 
spirit  and  its  application  to  literature.  Under  this  in- 
fluence the  conception  of  law  ceased  to  be  fluid  and 
vital  and  was  petrified  into  the  mechanical  rule. 

Most  of  the  neo-classic  rules  in  themselves  point 
the  way  to  a- very  important  set  of  half-truths,  —  the 
half-truths  that  dawned  on  the  men  of  the  Renais- 
sance when  they  had  their  glimpse  of  the  antique 
symmetry.  The  contrast  between  the  masterpieces 
of  Greece  and  Rome  and  the  works  of  the  Middle 
Ages  seemed  to  the  Renaissance  the  contrast  be- 
tween form  and  formlessness.  Even  a  Leonardo  re- 
gretted his  failure  to  recover  the  antique  symmetry, 
but  he  at  least  imitated  the  ancients  vitally ;  whereas 
many  of  the  Aristotelian  casuists  held  out  the  hope 
that  the  antique  symmetry  might  be  recovered  by 
imitating  the  ancients  outwardly  and  mechanically. 

In  the  name  of  form  as  they  conceived  it,  the 
casuists  carried  on  a  campaign  against  the  mediaeval 
romances,  a  campaign  that  deserves  to  be  more  care- 
[191] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

fully  studied  than  it  has  been  hitherto,  by  some  one 
who  is  at  once  an  exact  scholar  and  a  man  of  ideas.' 
The  gist  of  this  attack  on  the  romances  is  that  they 
are  lacking  in  unity,  measure,  purpose,  as  the  casu- 
ists understood  these  terms.  The  romances  begin 
anywhere  and  leave  off  anywhere ;  have  no  art  of 
omission  or  selection ;  no  subordination  of  incident 
to  some  definite  end.  Thus  Ariosto,  instead  of  deal- 
ing with  a  single  important  action  of  one  hero, 
promises  at  the  beginning  of  his  poem  to  sing  of 
ladies  and  knights  and  arms  and  heaven  knows  what 
else,  —  in  short,  a  mere  jumble  of  romantic  adven- 
ture. And  so  Ariosto  is  condemned  by  many  of  the 
casuists,  and  Tasso  praised  as  being  nearer  to  the 
antique  symmetry;  whereas,  judged  by  the  psycho- 
logical test,  the  only  test  that  has  value  in  such  mat- 
ters, Ariosto  is,  of  course,  very  much  nearer  the 
ancients  than  Tasso.  In  other  words,  the  casuists 
did  not  go  beneath  the  surface ;  they  were  for  having 
art  and  literature  carefully  restrained,  highly  unified, 

'  Professor  Spingarn  (Literary  Criticism  in  the  Jiciiaiisaiue, 
pp.  Ii2-i24)has  given  a  summary  of  this  debate  between  tlie 
partisans  of  epic  and  romance.  As  I  have  pointed  out  elsewhere 
(p.  74),  one  of  the  weapons  used  in  attacking  the  romances  and 
proving  their  lack  of  purpose  was  the  idea  of  "probability." 

[  192] 


THE   LIMITS   OF  NATURALISM 

supremely  purposeful ;  but  in  interpreting  their  re- 
straint and  unity  and  purpose  they  failed  to  dis- 
tinguish between  form  and  formalism.  Moreover,  the 
neo-classical  creed  took  definite  shape  during  a  pe- 
riod of  concentration,  a  concentration  that  was  itself 
more  formal  than  vital;  and  so  in  the  imitation  of 
the  ancients  emphasis  was  laid  almost  entirely  on  the 
virtues  of  concentration,  and  not,  as  might  have  been 
the  case  in  the  earlier  Renaissance,  on  the  expansive 
virtues  as  well. 

Consequently,  when  the  forces  of  expansion  again 
prevailed,  the  neo-classic  rules  came  to  be  felt  as 
mere  artificiality  and  convention,  as  a  mortal  con- 
straint on  everything  that  is  vital  and  spontaneous.. 
There  took  place  one  of  those  violent  oscillations 
from  one  set  of  half-truths  to  another  that  are  not 
uncommon  in  the  history  of  mankind  and  that  Luther 
compares  to  the  swayings  of  a  drunken  peasant  on 
horseback.  The  romantic  movement  was  inspired, 
even  more  than  most  movements,  by  the  ambition  ta 
be  the  very  opposite  of  everything  that  had  gone  be- 
fore. The  neo-classic  school  had  converted  the  ideas, 
of  unity  and  measure  and  purpose  and  of  law  itself 
into  mere  formalism ;  the  romanticists  in  getting  rid 
[195I 


-Tk 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

of  formalism  were  for  getting  rid  at  the  same  time  of 
the  ideas  of  unity  and  measure  and  purpose  and  law 
itself.  They  would  be  aimless  and  lawless  and  live  in 
a  perpetual  paradox.  For  example,  a  play  of  Tieck's, 
with  its  hashing  together  of  different  arts  and  its  mix- 
ture of  vaLvious £vnres,  epic,  lyric,  etc.,  is  a  deliberate 
defiance  of  all  the  laws  that  had  been  supposed  to  gov- 
ern the  drama;  and  though  in  theory  we  may  grant 
that  these  laws  are  not  absolute,  in  practice  it  is 
about  as  sensible  for  any  one  aiming  at  true  dramatic 
effect  to  fly  in  the  face  of  them  in  the  way  Tieck  has 
done,  as  it  would  be  to  fly  in  the  face  of  the  law  of 
gravitation,  which  according  to  the  latest  school  of 
physics  is  not  to  be  taken  absolutely,  either. 

A  great  deal  has  been  said  about  the  lawlessness 
and  aimlessness  of  the  German  romanticists  in  partic- 
ular, but  in  this  respect  as  in  many  others  they  were 
anticipated  by  Rousseau,  who  already  expresses,  and 
with  a  more  consummate  art  than  that  possessed  by 
many  of  his  disciples,  the  mood  of  vagabondage,  the 
joy  of  emancipation  from  any  definite  purpose  that 
is  so  pervasive  in  modern  literature.  "I  love,"  says 
Rousseau,  "  to  busy  myself  with  mere  nothings  ;  to 
begin  a  hundred  things  and  finish  no  one  of  them ;  to 
[  194  ] 


1 


THE   LIMITS   OF  NATURALISM 

go  and  come  as  the  whim  takes  me ;  to  change  my 
plans  every  instant ;  to  follow  a  fly  in  all  its  move- 
ments ;  to  turn  up  a  stone  to  see  what  is  under  it ; 
to  undertake  ardently  a  task  that  would  require  ten 
years  and  give  it  up  without  regret  at  the  end  of  ten 
minutes ;  in  fine,  to  muse  all  the  day  long  without 
order  and  sequence,  and  to  follow  in  all  things  only  the 
caprice  of  the  moment."  If  we  contrast  with  this 
passage  Aristotle's  saying  that  the  end  is  the  chief 
thing  of  all,  we  shall  have  the  two  most  divergent 
views  imaginable  of  life  and  art. 

Rousseau,  as  he  never  tires  of  telling  us,  has  a 
horror  of  every  constraint  upon  his  emotional  im- 
pulse. He  does  not  spurn  merely  certain  special  bar- 
riers and  limitations  but  all  barriers  and  limitations 
whatsoever.  When  he  speaks  of  liberty,  he  does  not 
mean,  as  a  typical  Englishman  (let  us  say  Burke) 
would  mean,  liberty  defined  and  limited  by  law,  but 
an  undefined  liberty  that  is  tempered  only  by  sym- 
pathy, which  in  turn  is  tempered  by  nothing  at  all. 
An  undefined  liberty  and  an  unselective  sympathy 
are  the  two  main  aspects  of  the  movement  initiated 
by  Rousseau  —  the  poles  between  which  it  oscillates. 
Some  Rousseauists  have  exalted  sympathy  almost  to 
[195] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

the  exclusion  of  liberty,  others  have  exalted  liberty 
almost  to  the  exclusion  of  sympathy,  and  others  again 
have  exalted  both  sympathy  and  liberty.  At  the  very 
sound  of  the  words  love  and  liberty  they  would  have 
us  swept  off  our  feet  by  a  wave  of  enthusiasm,  and 
indeed  look  on  it  as  almost  sacrilegious  to  submit 
these  words  to  a  cool  examination.  But  what  are  we 
to  think  of  love  and  liberty  that  would  set  themselves 
above  every  law,  especially  the  highest  law  of  which 
man  has  finite  knowledge,  the  law  of  measure  ?  This 
conception  of  love  and  liberty  may  very  well  cease 
to  be  a  virtue  and  become  a  disease.  Inasmuch  as 
the  word  anarchy  has  come  to  have  a  somewhat 
special  connotation,  we  may  call  this  disease,  for  lack 
of  a  better  term,  eleutheromania.  J^ 

Eleutheromania  may  be  defined  as  the  instinct 
to  throw  off  not  simply  outer  and  artificial  limita- 
tions, but  all  limitations  whatsoever.  For  example, 
Friedrich  Schlegel  is  an  eleutheromaniac  when  he 
says  that  the  "caprice  of  the  poet  will  suffer  no  law 
above  itself."  To  any  great  poet  of  the  past,  to 
Dante  for  instance,  such  an  utterance  would  have 
seemed  a  horrible  blasphemy,  and  Dante  would  not 
have  been  far  mistaken.  Tolstoy,  again,  is  an  eleu- 
[  196  ] 


THE   LIMITS   OF   NATURALISM 

theromaniac  in  his  notion  of  sympathy ;  Nietzsche, 
in  his  notion  of  Hberty.  These  two  men,  indeed,  stand 
at  what  I  have  defined  as  the  opposite  poles  of  Rous- 
seauism.  Of  course,  it  is  an  infinitely  deHcate  task  to 
determine  how  far  any  particular  man  has  fallen  into 
excess  in  his  emphasis  on  love  or  liberty.  There  is 
plainly  eleutheromania  in  Byron's  idea  of  liberty,  as 
there  is  in  Shelley's  idea  of  sympathy  ;  but  this  eleu- 
theromania had  at  least  some  justification  as  a  pro- 
test against  a  counter-excess  of  Toryism  in  the  society 
of  their  time.  Nowadays  the  excess  is  of  a  very  dif- 
ferent kind  :  society  is  plainly  suffering  from  a  lack 
rather  than  a  superabundance  of  discipline  and  re- 
straint. Many  of  the  greatest  of  our  modern  artists, 
Hugo,  Wagner,  Ibsen,  etc.,  have  been  eleuthero- 
maniacs.  For  over  a  century  the  world  has  been  fed 
on  a  steady  diet  of  revolt.  Everybody  is  becoming 
tinged  with  eleutheromania,  taken  up  with  his  rights 
rather  than  with  his  duties,  more  and  more  unwill- 
ing to  accept  limitations.  We  all  know  how  perilous 
it  is  to  suggest  to  the  modern  woman  that  she  has 
any  "  sphere  "  ;  and,  indeed,  if  man  is  to  be  an  eleu- 
theromaniac  it  is  hard  to  see  why  woman  should  be 
denied  the  same  privilege.  The  present  prospect  is 
[197] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

that  society  will  get  its  fingers  badly  burned  before 
it  learns  to  distinguish  between  true  freedom  and 
brotherhood  and  the  freedom  and  brotherhood  that 
are  only  a  special  form  of  the  Rousseauistic  art  of 
making  madness  beautiful. 

We  should  have  the  courage  to  affirm  in  the  face 
of  most  contemporary  opinion  that  a  man  may  throw 
off  the  outer  law  only  in  the  name  of  a  higher  law,  and 
not  in  the  name  of  universal  sympathy.  We  should 
note  the  difference  in  this  respect  between  the  art 
of  Richard  Wagner  and  the  art  of  the  Greeks,  the 
spirit  of  which  he  claims  to  be  reviving.  According 
to  Wagner,  as  we  have  seen,  the  arts  are  to  melt 
voluptuously  together,  inspired  by  the  spirit  of  free- 
dom. What  we  actually  have  in  the  Greek  drama  is 
a  flexible  interplay  of  the  different  arts  and  genres 
that  is  governed  by  an  exquisite  restraint.  As  Andr6 
Chenier  says  in  speaking  of  Greek  art,  "  No  genre 
escaping  from  its  prescribed  boundaries  would  have 
dared   to  trespass  on  the    frontiers  of  another." ' 

'  La  nature  dicta  vingt  genres  opposes, 
D'un  fil  l^ger  entre  eux,  chez  les  Grecs,  divis^s. 
Nul  genre,  sVchappant  de  ses  bornes  prescrites, 
N'aurait  ose  d'un  autre  envahir  les  limitcs. 

L'  Invention. 
[198] 


THE   LIMITS   OF   NATURALISM 

Wagner  shows  something  akin  to  effrontery  in  his 
attempt  to  turn  the  story  of  Antigone  into  a  human- 
itarian symbol.'  Antigone,  says  Wagner,  opposes 
to  the  harsh  laws  of  the  state,  a  love  for  all  man- 
kind. But  in  reality  if  Antigone  violates  the  edicts 
of  Creon  it  is  only,  as  she  asserts,  that  she  may 
obey  laws  still  higher  and  more  sacred,  — 

Unwritten  laws,  eternal  in  the  heavens. 
Not  of  to-day  or  yesterday  are  these, 
But  live  from  everlasting,  and  from  whence 
They  sprang,  none  knoweth.^ 

In  short,  as  depicted  by  Sophocles,  Antigone  is 
not  an  eleutheromaniac  but  a  civilized  woman.  The 
sense  one  has  of  vital  law  as  something  distinct 
from  either  outer  authority  or  the  impulses  of  tem- 
perament may  be  taken  in  general  as  the  highest, 
perhaps  the  only  true,  test  of  civilization. 

Of  course,  I  should  not  assert  that  a  deliberate 
revolt  against  both  the  inner  and  the  outer  law  has 
marked  the  whole  of  the  modern  movement.  Only 
one  side  of  this  movement — the  side  I  have  asso- 
ciated with  Rousseau — has  been  deliberately  an- 

'  opera  and  Drama  (Ellis's  translation),  pp.  183  ff. 
'  Antigone,  453  ff.  Cf.  also  CEdipus  Rex,  865  ff. 

[  199] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

archistic,  and  the  movement  has  been  too  vast  to 
be  completely  represented  by  any  one  man  or  set 
of  men.  Yet  we  should  not  overlook  certain  conse- 
quences of  the  drift  toward  a  naturalistic  concep- 
tion of  life  that  has  been  visible  during  the  past 
hundred  years,  and  indeed  more  or  less  since  the 
Renaissance.  One  of  these  results  has  been  a  weak- 
ening of  the  idea  of  a  law  for  human  nature  as  some- 
thing distinct  from  the  law  for  physical  nature. 
"There  are  two  laws,  discrete,  not  reconciled,"  says 
Emerson, —  "  Law  for  man,  and  law  for  thing."  But 
for  the  pure  naturalist  there  is  only  one  law,  the 
law  for  thing.  Now  any  one  who  thus  identifies  man 
with  phenomenal  nature,  whether  scientifically  or 
sentimentally,  is  almost  inevitably  led  to  value  only 
the  virtues  of  expansion ;  for  according  to  natural 
law,  to  grow  is  to  expand.  Diderot's  contemporaries 
spoke  of  him  as  an  expansive  man  ;  in  this  respect 
Diderot,  like  Rousseau,  was  a  true  ancestor  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  All  the  men  who  were  typically 
of  the  nineteenth  century  were  expansive  men. 
Think,  for  example,  how  purely  expansive  Dickens 
was  in  his  view  of  life,  and  how  in  spite  of  his  un- 
doubted genius  his  art  suffers  from  this  excess  of 
[  200  ] 


THE   LIMITS   OF  NATURALISM 

expansiveness.  The  sentimental  naturalist  wishes 
to  expand  emotionally,  and  is  averse  to  anything 
that  would  set  a  bound  to  emotion.  The  scientific 
naturalist  would  go  on  increasing  forever  in  know- 
ledge and  power,  and  eyes  askance  anything  that 
seems  to  fix  limits  to  this  increase. 

Yet  in  spite  of  the  naturalists,  scientific  and  sen- 
timental, we  must  insist  not  only  that  there  is  a  law 
for  man  as  well  as  a  law  for  thing,  but  that  the  ac- 
tual reason  may  be  given  why  the  two  laws  are  dis- 
crete and  unreconciled.  If  man  as  a  natural  phe- 
nomenon grows  by  expanding,  man  as  man  grows 
by  concentrating.  He  proves  that  he  is  set  above 
nature,  not  so  much  by  his  power  to  act,  as  by  his 
power  to  refrain  from  acting.  According  to  Emer- 
son, God  himself  is  defined  by  the  Orientals  as  the 
"  inner  check."  I  do  not  happen  to  know  of  any 
oriental  book  in  which  this  precise  phrase  occurs, 
but  the  idea  is  found  in  almost  every  truly  religious 
book  that  was  ever  written  in  either  the  East  or 
West. 

The  chief  use  of  any  widening  out  of  know- 
ledge and  sympathy  must  be  to  prepare  man  more 
fully  for  the  supreme  moment  of  concentration  and 

[201  ] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

selection,  the  moment  when  he  exercises  his  own 
special  faculties.  Now,  to  select  rightly  a  man  must 
have  right  standards,  and  to  have  right  standards 
means  in  practice  that  he  must  constantly  set 
bounds  to  his  own  impulses.  Man  grows  in  the  per- 
fection proper  to  his  own  nature  in  almost  direct 
ratio  to  his  growth  in  restraint  and  self-control.  The 
neo-classic  humanists  were  right  after  all  in  looking 
on  the  highest  law  as  a  law  of  concentration,  —  a 
law  of  unity,  measure,  purpose.  Only  they  were 
wrong  in  turning  this  law  into  mere  formalism.  The 
sentimental  naturalists,  however,  erred  still  more 
gravely  when  in  getting  rid  of  the  formalism  they 
got  rid  at  the  same  time  of  unity,  measure,  purpose, 
and  gave  themselves  up  to  mere  emotional  expan- 
sion. This  meant  in  practice  getting  rid  of  the  very 
idea  of  a  special  law  for  human  nature.  For  the 
word  law  means  in  practice  the  establishing  of  a 
causal  sequence  between  a  certain  number  of  iso- 
lated facts  or  phenomena ;  and  any  one  who  seriously 
sets  out  to  establish  a  causal  sequence  between  the 
facts  of  human  nature  will  speedily  come  to  recog- 
nize other  forces  besides  those  of  expansion.  Fur- 
thermore all   the  experience  of  the  past,  cries,  as 

[  202  ] 


THE   LIMITS    OF   NATURALISM 

though  with  a  thousand  tongues,  through  the  mani- 
fold creeds  and  systems  in  which  it  has  been  very 
imperfectly  formulated,  that  the  highest  human  law 
is  a  law  of  concentration.  Therefore  the  sentimental 
naturalist  wants  none  of  this  experience ;  he  would 
live  as  though  "none  had  lived  before  him,"  and,  in 
his  attempt  to  remain  purely  expansive,  try  to  set 
up  the  things  that  are  below  the  reason  as  a  substi- 
tute for  the  things  that  are  above  it.  I  have  actu- 
ally heard  Sophocles  called  romantic  because  of  the 
"  CEdipus  at  Colonus."  But  what  relation  is  there 
between  the  wonder  of  the  child  and  the  religious 
awe  that  broods  over  all  the  latter  part  of  this  play  ? 
To  lose  sight  of  such  distinctions  is  to  show  one's 
self,  not  childlike,  but  childish. 

By  no  means  all  the  romanticism  of  the  past  cen- 
tury has  been  of  the  Rousseauistic  type.  A  great 
deal  of  it  has  simply  been  what  one  is  tempted  to 
call  the  normal  romanticism  of  the  human  spirit,  its 
propensity  for  fiction,  for  wonder,  adventure,  sur- 
prise, rather  than  for  the  tracing  of  cause  and  ef- 
fect. But  all  the  forms  of  romanticism  have  received 
an  immense  stimulus  from  the  naturalistic  move- 
ment. Professor  Santayana  speaks  of  the  "  romantic 
[203  ] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

drama,  where  accidents  make  the  meaningless  hap- 
piness or  unhappiness  of  a  supersensitive  adventu- 
rer." Now  the  romantic  drama  has  ceased  to  be  an 
important  genre,  but  Professor  Santayana's  phrase 
may  in  most  cases  be  applied  with  equal  appro- 
priateness to  the  only  literary  form  that  has  in 
these  latter  days  retained  vigor  and  vitality,  —  the 
novel. 

The  novel  is  the  one  genre  that  the  neo-classicists 
had  not  regulated,  partly,  no  doubt,  because  they 
had  not  thought  it  worth  the  trouble.  It  had  no  for- 
mal laws  and  limits,  and  so  was  admirably  adapted, 
as  Rousseau  showed  in  the  "  Nouvelle  Hdolfse,"  to 
free  emotional  expansion.  The  novel  is  not  only  the 
least  purposeful  of  the  literary  forms,  the  one  that 
lends  itself  most  naturally  to  all  the  meanders  of 
feeling,  to  a  vast  overflow  of  "  soul"  in  the  roman- 
tic sense,  but  it  also  admits  most  readily  a  pho- 
tographic realism,  —  that  is,  an  art  without  selec- 
tion. The  triumph  of  the  novel  has  been,  if  not  the 
triumph  of  formlessness  over  form,  at  least  the  tri- 
umph of  diffuseness  over  concentration.  Friedrich 
Schlegel  was  right  from  his  own  point  of  view  in 
exalting  the  novel  as  a  sort  of  confusion  of  all  the 
[  204] 


THE   LIMITS  OF   NATURALISM 

other  literary  forms/  the  visible  embodiment  of  that 
chaos  of  human  nature  of  which  he  dreamed. 

The  relation  between  sentimental  naturalism  and 
the  prodigious  development  of  fiction  in  the  nineteenth 
century  is  obvious.  This  development  is  also  related, 
though  less  obviously,  to  scientific  naturalism ;  for 
the  nineteenth  century  was  not  merely  the  most  ro- 
mantic, it  was  also  the  most  analytic  of  centuries.  So 
far  from  taking  life  purely  as  an  adventure,  it  was  en- 
gaged most  actively  in  following  out  causes  and  effects 
and  so  arriving  at  the  notion  of  law;  but  the  law 
that  it  was  thus  tracing  was  the  law  of  phenomenal 
nature,  "  the  law  for  thing."  This  scientific  investi- 
gation of  nature  and  the  sentimental  communion  with 
nature  of  the  Rousseauist  seem  at  first  sight  to  di- 
verge radically,  especially  if  we  remember  the  attacks 
on  science  by  many  of  the  romanticists  (beginning 
with  Rousseau  himself).  But  this  divergence  is  more 
apparent  than  real.  In  the  first  place  the  scientist 
has  never  taken  any  too  "seriously  the  lamentations 
of  the  romanticist  over  the  disenchanting  effects  of 
analysis.  He  knows  that  his  own  hegemony  is  not 

'  Schlegel  set  out  deliberately  to  confuse  the  genres  in  his  own 
novel  Lucinde, 

[205] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

threatened  by  any  number  of  romanticists,  that  he 
is  a  stronger  and  more  masculine  individual.  Then, 
too,  he  recognizes  an  element  of  truth  in  the  roman- 
tic contention.  Analysis  is  desiccating  and  takes  the 
bloom  off  things,  he  admits.  He  feels  the  need  of 
recovering  this  bloom,  of  plunging  into  the  spon- 
taneous and  the  unconscious,  of  cultivating  the  naive 
and  the  primitive,  in  due  subordination  of  course  to 
analysis.  It  was  in  this  spirit  that  John  Stuart  Mill 
read  Wordsworth's  poetry/  It  is  indeed  the  normal 
relation  not  only  of  the  scientist  but  of  the  modern 
man  in  general,  toward  art  and  literature.  He  is 
feverishly  engaged  in  the  conquest  of  matter  and 
in  following  out  the  strict  causal  sequences  that  are 
necessary  to  this  end.  When  he  comes  to  literature 
he  has  already  had  his  fill  of  analysis,  of  cause  and 
effect,  and  aspires  rather  to  something  that  loosens 
and  relaxes  the  mind,  to  something  that  is  naive  and 
illogical  and  unexpected.  He  is  willing  to  look  on 
life  for  a  while  from  the  angle  of  Alice  in  Wonder- 
land;  or  subside  into  the  Peter  Pan  point  of  view; 
or  even  become  one  of  the  Babes  in  Toyland.  He 
is  ripe  for  the  light  novel,  or  the  extravaganza,  or 

'  Cf.  Iloff  ding's  History  of  Modern  Philosophy,  vol.  ii,  p.  399. 
[  206] 


THE   LIMITS   OF   NATURALISM 

the  musical  comedy;  and  the  romanticist  stands 
ready  to  supply  him  with  these  things.  To  be  sure, 
the  romanticist  often  claims  to  be  a  sublime  idealist. 
But  having  lost  all  sense  of  a  definite  human  law 
and  of  the  standards  and  discipline  it  implies  he  is 
in  reality  reduced  to  the  role  of  catering  to  those  who 
wish  relaxation  from  analysis —  to  the  tired  scientist, 
and  the  fagged  philologist  and  the  weary  man  of 
business.  We  have  here  the  explanation  of  the  enor- 
mous vogue  of  fiction  in  these  latter  days  as  well  as 
the  reason  why  art  and  literature  are  appealing  more 
and  more  exclusively  to  women,  and  to  men  in  their 
unmasculine  moods. 

One  cannot  hope  to  understand  the  nineteenth 
century  without  tracing  this  curious  interplay  of 
scientific  and  sentimental  naturalism.  Let  us  illus- 
trate concretely  from  one  of  the  great  representative 
figures  of  the  century,  perhaps  the  most  represen- 
tative of  modern  philologists,  Ernest  Renan.  "  The 
more  a  man  develops  intellectually,"  says  Renan, 
"  the  more  he  dreams  of  the  contrary  pole,  that  is 
to  say  of  the  irrational,  of  repose  in  complete  igno- 
rance, of  the  woman  who  is  only  woman,  the  in- 
stinctive being  who  acts  only  on  the  impulse  of  an 
[207] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

obscure  consciousness.  The  brain  scorched  by  rea- 
soning thirsts  for  simplicity  as  the  desert  thirsts 
for  pure  water,"  etc.  In  other  words,  intellectual 
unrestraint  is  to  be  tempered  by  an  unrestrained 
emotionalism.  The  "  debauches  of  dialectic  "  that 
produce  "moments  of  dryness,  hours  of  aridity" 
are  to  be  offset  by  the  •'  kisses  of  the  naive  being 
in  whom  nature  lives  and  smiles." '  This  is  the 
dream  of  a  nineteenth-century  Titan  who  hopes  to 
scale  heaven  by  piling  the  emotional  Ossa  on  the 
intellectual  Pelion ;  who  will  do  anything  rather  than 
recognize  a  law  that  imposes  measure  on  all  things  — 
even  the  libido  scicndi.  One  is  tempted  to  add,  at 
the  risk  of  being  thought  flippant,  that  all  this  talk  of 
the  "  kisses  of  the  naive  being  "  as  a  substitute  for 
religious  restraint  smacks  of  decadence.  Besides, 
the  woman  who  is  only  woman  in  Renan's  sense 
is  a  genre  tranche  that  promises  to  be  increasingly 
rare.  Not  every  Rousseauist  can  hope  to  be  as  for- 
tunate as  the  master  and  find  a  Thdrese  Levasseur. 
Possibly  the  dryness  and  aridity  Rcnan  associates 

'  For  all  the  passages  I  have  quoted,  see  Preface  to  Souvenirs 
(Tenfance  et  de  jeunesse.  I  have  discussed  Renan  more  fully  as  a 
type  of  the  nineteenth-century  naturalist  in  the  introduction  to 
my  edition  of  the  Souvenirs  (U.  C.  Heath  &  Co.,  Boston). 

[  208  ] 


THE   LIMITS   OF   NATURALISM 

with  the  study  of  the  natural  law  is  due  at  least  in 
part  to  the  interpreting  of  this  law  too  strictly. 
For  one  remarkable  point  is  to  be  noted  about  the 
men  of  the  nineteenth  century :  if  they  held  the 
law  for  man  loosely  or  not  at  all,  they  often  made 
up  for  it  by  holding  too  rigidly  the  natural  law.  In 
other  words,  during  this  period  man  was  an  im- 
pressionist about  the  law  of  his  own  being  and  a 
dogmatist  about  the  law  of  physical  nature.  For 
however  different  the  law  for  man  and  the  law  for 
thing  may  be  in  other  respects,  they  have  one  im- 
portant resemblance :  neither  law  can  be  finally  for- 
mulated, for  the  simple  reason  that  each  law  takes 
hold  upon  the  infinite,  —  the  one  upon  the  infinitely 
large,  the  other  upon  the  infinitely  small.  These 
are  the  two  infinitudes  of  which  Pascal  speaks. 
Man  thinks,  says  Pascal,  that  he  has  found  firm 
foundations  on  which  he  can  rear  himself  a  tower 
even  to  the  infinite ;  but  at  the  very  moment  when 
his  hopes  are  highest,  the  foundations  begin  to 
crack,  and  yawn  open  even  to  the  abyss.  The  sci- 
entific dogmatists  of  the  nineteenth  century  imag- 
ined that  they  had  reared  a  tower  of  this  kind. 
Some  of  them  are  as  good  examples  of  what  I  have 
[209] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

termed  the  error  of  intellectualisni  or  the  metaphysi- 
cal ilkision,  as  was  any  theologian  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
Did  any  theologian  ever  carry  further  what  one 
may  call  the  intoxication  of  the  formula  than  Taine? ' 
Many  of  the  speculations  of  science  merely  repre- 
sent the  desperate  strainings  of  the  human  spirit 
to  grasp  in  its  essence  and  formulate  what  must 
forever  elude  it,  —  the  final  truth  of  the  infinitely 
small, — just  as  a  certain  type  of  theology  is  an 
equally  futile  attempt  to  grasp  in  its  essence  and 
formulate  the  infinitely  great.  We  must  note,  how- 
ever, one  fortunate  difference:  no  one  is  likely  to 
be  burned  at  the  stake  for  not  holding  right  views 
about  ions  and  electrons,  as  men  once  were  for  not 
being  orthodox  about  the  Trinity. 

Furthermore,  a  less  dogmatic  temper  is  becom- 
ing apparent  among  the  scientists  themselves.  The 

'  We  may  note  as  an  extreme  example  the  passage  in  which 
Taine  derives  the  whole  of  Roman  histor)-  from  one  sharply  for- 
mulated law  :  "  Oubliez  I'immense  entassement  des  details  innom- 
brables.  Possedant  la  formule,  vous  avez  le  reste.  lis  tiennent  au 
large  dans  une  demi-ligne  ;  vous  enfermez  douze  cents  ans  et  la 
moitie  du  monde  antique  dans  le  creux  de  votre  main"  (Philo- 
sophes  classiques  du  XIX'  siicle,  pp.  367,  36S).  This  book  ends  with 
the  vision  of  a  single  gigantic  scientific  Formula  that  is  to  contain 
the  whole  truth  of  nature. 

[  210] 


THE  LIMITS   OF  NATURALISM 

foundations  of  their  tower  of  intellectualism  that 
seemed  so  firm  to  the  men  of  the  mid-nineteenth 
century,  are  already  beginning  to  crack  visibly.  In 
practice  this  means  that  the  scientists  are  coming 
to  hold  the  idea  of  law  more  fluidly.  For  example, 
M.  Poincar6  says  in  his  book  on  the  "Value  of 
Science,"  which  has  been  selling  in  France  like  a 
popular  novel,  that  science  can  never  arrive  at  es- 
sences ;  at  most,  scientific  "  laws  "  can  be  only  a 
provisional  and  approximate  expression  of  relation- 
ships,' If  we  compare  M.  Poincare's  book  with  a 
book  like  Haeckel's  "  Riddle  of  the  Universe,"  we 
shall  be  conscious  of  a  certain  decrease  in  scientific 
dogmatism,  though  there  is  still  room  for  improve- 
ment. If  the  perception  gains  ground  that  man's 
knowledge  of  physical,  like  his  knowledge  of  human 
nature,  is  destined  always  to  remain  a  mere  glimpse 
and  infinitesimal  fragment,  there  may  be  hope  of 
reaction  against  what  one  may  call  scientific  Titan- 
ism,  There  might  even  be  some  recovery  of  that 
true  humility — the  inner  obeisance  of  the  spirit  to 
something  higher  than  itself  —  that  has  almost  be- 
come one  of  the  lost  virtues, 

*  La  Valeur  de  la  Science,  par  H,  Poincare  ;  p.  267  and  passim. 
[211] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

Of  course,  the  diminishing  faith  in  scientific  in- 
tellectualism  may  simply  lead  to  an  oscillation  to- 
ward the  Rousseauistic  pole.  This  as  a  matter  of 
fact  is  what  we  see  in  contemporary  philosophers 
like  Professor  James  and  M.  Bergson.  M.  Berg- 
son's  point  of  view  is  a  protest  against  the  hard  and 
cramping  determinism  that  certain  scientific  dog- 
matists would  impose  upon  the  human  spirit ;  it  is 
at  the  same  time  a  plea  for  creative  spontaneity. 
But  M.  Bergson  does  not  himself  overstep  the 
bounds  of  naturalism.  His  spontaneity  is  Rous- 
seauistic, not  Platonic  ;  that  is,  it  aims  at  vital  ex- 
pansion and  not  at  vital  concentration.  The  very 
phrases  of  M.  Bergson  that  are  most  current  are 
significant  in  this  respect,  —  phrases  for  instance 
like  dlan  vital  and  pouss^e  intihiciire.  The  main 
concern  of  a  Platonist  would  have  been  with  that 
something  that  seems  to  proceed  from  the  inner- 
most recesses  of  man's  being,  and  that  makes  itself 
felt,  not  as  impulse,  but  rather  as  a  norm  and  check 
upon  impulse,  —  not  as  an  dan  vital,  but  rather  as 
a  frci}i  vital.  M.  Bergson's  revolt  from  the  stark 
determinism  in  which  a  certain  over-analytic  and 
mechanical    conception   of    scientific    truth  would 

[  212] 


THE   LIMITS   OF   NATURALISM 

imprison  nature  and  human  nature  reminds  one  of 
some  of  the  German  romantic  philosophers.  Only 
we  may  note  among  other  differences,  that  the 
Rousseauistic  element  in  M.  Bergson's  thinking, 
his  exaltation  of  the  vital  and  the  spontaneous,  does 
not,  as  it  so  often  does  in  a  Schelling  or  a  Schleier- 
macher,  assume  a  pseudo-Platonic  mask.  The  world 
has  grown  so  "tough-minded"  in  the  interval  that 
it  is  willing  to  put  up  with  a  philosophy  that  has 
laid  aside  even  the  pretext  of  unity. 

The  reaction  we  have  been  describing  against 
certain  exaggerations  of  the  scientific  spirit  is  evi- 
dently not  one  that  can  altogether  satisfy  the  hu- 
manist. This  point  will  become  clear  if  we  consider 
for  a  moment  the  bearing  of  exaggerated  science,  or 
as  we  may  term  it,  pseudo-science,  upon  our  present 
problem  regarding  the  nature  of  the  genres  and  the 
proper  boundaries  of  the  arts.  Science,  we  should 
add,  may  become  false  either  by  holding  its  own 
law  too  dogmatically,  or  else  by  trying  to  set  up  this 
law  as  a  substitute  for  the  human  law.  I  have 
already  mentioned  a  book  that  is  an  egregious  ex- 
ample of  both  kinds  of  pseudo-science,  Haeckel's 
"Riddle  of  the  Universe."  Books  like  that  of 
[213] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

Haeckel  suggest  that  nowadays  we  are  as  prone  to 
err  by  interpreting  human  nature  in  terms  of  physi- 
cal nature  as  men  once  were  by  doing  the  exact 
opposite.  Thus  the  ancients  had  a  theory  that  when 
the  giant  Enceladus,  who  was  pinioned  under  Mount 
.^tna,  tried  to  turn  over,  the  whole  of  Sicily 
trembled.  Some  of  Haeckel's  theories  are  about  as 
near  to  accounting  for  human  nature  as  was  this 
ancient  theory  to  accounting  for  earthquakes.  Mil- 
ton, again,  speaks  of  the  comet  that  from  "  his 
horrid  hair  shakes  pestilence  and  war."  But  the 
comet  is  now  related  to  laws  that  are  independent 
of  human  hopes  and  fears,  and  so  it  has  ceased  to  be 
a  portent  and  is  entered  in  the  "  dull  catalogue  of 
common  things  "  ;  and  this  is  a  gain,  but  not  an 
unmixed  gain  if  we  are  thus  led  to  suppose  that  we 
can  compute  the  orbit  of  human  nature  by  methods 
similar  to  those  employed  for  the  comet. 

Naturalists,  both  sentimental  and  scientific,  tend 
to  reduce  everything  to  terms  of  motion,  to  see 
everything  passing  over  into  everything  else  by 
almost  insensible  gradations,  to  refuse  to  accept 
any  firm  line  of  demarcation.  We  have  already  seen 
how  the  German  romanticists  felt  emotionally  this 
[214] 


THE   LIMITS   OF   NATURALISM 

running  over  of  every  art  into  every  other  art 
(page  124).  The  scientific  naturalists  have  the  same 
point  of  view.  "  Everything,"  says  Diderot,  who 
was  both  a  scientific  and  sentimental  naturalist,  "is 
a  perpetual  flux  ;  every  animal  is  more  or  less  man  ; 
every  animal  is  more  or  less  plant ;  every  plant  is 
more  or  less  mineral ;  there  is  nothing  precise  in 
nature."  Because  the  genera  and  species  evolve 
and  run  together  in  this  way  on  the  physical  plane, 
it  is  easy  to  take  the  next  step  and  assume  that  the 
literary  genres  evolve  and  run  together  in  the  same 
way.  This  is  what  is  known  as  the  biological  ana- 
logy. But  any  one  who  would  make  of  this  com- 
parison between  the  natural  genus  and  the  literary 
genre  anything  besides  a  more  or  less  useful  met- 
aphor, at  once  falls  into  pseudo-science.  Bruneti^re, 
for  example,  is  pseudo-scientific  in  his  literary  Dar- 
winism or  Evolution  des  genres.  The  reason  is 
obvious :  the  genres  are  related  not  merely  to  the 
natural  law,  but  in  a  vastly  higher  degree  to  the 
"law  for  man."  The  whole  matter  is  summed  up 
in  a  pregnant  phrase  of  Aristotle's:'  "Tragedy 
after  passing  through  many  transformations  finally 

'  Poetics,  iv. 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

found  its  true  nature  and  there  it  stopped."  This 
true  nature,  the  point  of  pause  and  perfection,  can 
be  judged  only  with  reference  to  the  human  law  and 
its  demands  for  unity,  measure,  purpose,  and  not 
with  reference  to  the  physical  law  which  in  itself 
can  give  only  an  endless  flux  and  relativity.  Nature 
is  the  region  of  the  Many.  If  art  is  to  be  humanized, 
it  must  not  simply  flow  with  nature  but  be  checked 
and  tempered  by  some  perception  of  the  One. 
That  is  why,  from  the  humanistic  point  of  view, 
there  is  no  particular  gain  in  oscillating  between 
the  extremes  of  the  naturalistic  movement,  in  op- 
posing the  Rousseauistic  extreme  to  the  scientific 
and  analytical  extreme,  or  vice  versa.  The  confu- 
sions with  which  we  are  troubled  may  be  traced  to 
two  main  sources,  emotional  unrestraint  and  pseudo- 
science  ;  and  both  these  sources  of  confusion  take 
their  rise  in  an  excess  of  naturalism.  Therefore,  if 
we  are  to  escape  these  confusions  we  need,  while 
retaining  the  naturalistic  virtues,  to  assert  also  the 
human  law  and  transcend  in  important  respects 
the  whole  naturalistic  point  of  view.  In  other  words, 
a  humanistic  revival  to  be  effective,  must  imply 
some  degree  of  reaction  against  both  romanticism 
[216] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

and  science,  against  both  the  impressionism  and  the 
dogmatism  that  were  pecuHar  to  the  last  century. 

It  remains  for  me  to  establish  a  closer  connec- 
tion between  the  theory  I  have  just  outlined  regard- 
ing the  limits  of  naturalism  and  the  specific  prob- 
lems I  have  been  discussing  in  this  book.  I  hope 
at  the  same  time  to  give  the  theory  itself  some- 
thing of  the  definiteness  and  concreteness  it  still 
lacks. 

2.     FORM    AND    EXPRESSION 

If  the  foregoing  analysis  is  correct,  the  nine- 
teenth century  was  a  period  of  naturalistic  excess, 
and  therefore  inclined  to  favor  too  exclusively  the 
virtues  of  expansion.  All  the  formal  boundaries 
and  limits  that  the  past  had  set  up  were  felt  only 
as  fetters  to  be  snapped  asunder  in  order  that  the 
human  spirit  might  expatiate  at  liberty.  We  need 
to  consider  for  a  moment  the  effect  of  these  ex- 
pansive tendencies  on  the  idea  that  must  underlie 
more  or  less  all  creative  efforts  in  either  art  or 
literature,  —  the  idea  of  beauty.  Far  be  it  from 
me  to  attempt  any  abstract  definition  of  beauty. 
This,  to  judge  from  the  vast  majority  of  works  on 
aesthetics,  is  a  temptation  of  the  enemy.  But  we 
[217] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

may  draw  certain  interesting  conclusions  if  we 
study  what  men  have  actually  meant  at  different 
epochs  when  they  spoke  of  a  thing  as  beautiful ; 
if  we  note  the  curious  ways  in  which  the  word 
beauty  has  been  warped  to  make  it  conform  to  the 
half-truth  that  happened  to  be  in  vogue  at  any 
particular  time. 

Thus  for  a  certain  type  of  neo-classicist  beauty 
resided  almost  entirely  in  symmetry  and  propor- 
tion. But  the  symmetry  and  proportion,  as  he 
conceived  them,  were  not  vital  but  mechanical. 
If  we  took  some  of  the  theories  of  the  Renaissance 
at  their  face  value  we  should  have  to  conclude  that 
beauty  in  the  plastic  arts  is  something  that  can  be 
constructed  with  a  rule  and  compass.  We  have 
studied  elsewhere  this  constant  neo-classical  tend- 
ency to  confound  form  with  formalism.  As  we 
approach  the  nineteenth  century  we  find  that  there 
is  a  diminishing  emphasis  on  the  formal  element 
in  beauty  and  a  growing  emphasis  on  the  element 
that  is  described  by  such  epithets  as  vital,  charac- 
teristic, picturesque,  individual,  —  in  short,  on  the 
element  that  may  be  summed  up  by  the  epithet 
expressive.  In  painting,  color  grows  in  favor  as 
V  [218] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

compared  with  line ;  in  all  the  arts  the  principle  of 
motion  prevails  increasingly  over  the  principle  of 
repose,  the  suggestive  detail  over  design  and  com- 
position. In  brief,  expression  triumphs  over  form. 
Indeed,  if  we  follow  down  the  attempts  that  men 
have  made  during  the  past  two  or  three  centuries 
to  define  beauty,  we  shall  find  that  the  formal  ele- 
ment has  vanished  away  more  and  more,  until 
nothing  has  been  left  but  pure  expression.  (We 
may  note  in  passing  that  this  is  exactly  what  hap- 
pened to  the  Cheshire  cat.)  The  ultra-romanticists 
go  still  further.  Beauty  is  not  only  reduced  to 
expression,  but  the  expression  itself  is  swallowed 
up  in  revery.  Beauty  becomes  a  sort  of  pursuit  of 
the  Chimera.  Thus  for  Poe  the  highest  beauty  is 
the  fugitive  glance  of  a  woman's  eye,  and  a  dream 
woman  at  that :  — 

And  all  my  days  are  trances, 

And  all  my  nightly  dreams 
Are  where  thy  gray  eye  glances 

And  where  thy  footstep  gleams  — 
In  what  ethereal  dances, 

By  what  eternal  streams. 

Beauty,  as  conceived  by  Poe  and  at  times  happily 
[219] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

achieved  in  his  verse,  may  be  defined  as  a  musical 
nostalgia.  If  we  connect  this  conception  with  Poe's 
definition  of  poetry,  "  the  rhythmical  creation  of 
Beauty,"  '  we  shall  have  an  interesting  contrast  with  • 
the  Renaissance  notion  that  the  essence  of  poetry 
is  the  imitating  of  human  actions  "  according  to 
probability  or  necessity." 

As  a  matter  of  fact  the  most  extreme  of  modern 
aesthetic  theories  are  merely  an  attempt  to  formu- 
late what  Poe  and  many  other  writers  and  artists 
have  actually  been  putting  in  practice  for  the  past 
hundred  years.  We  may  take,  as  an  example,  the 
aesthetic  theorist  who  is  perhaps  most  prominent 
in  Germany  just  now,  —  Professor  Theodor  Lipps.* 
Lipps  carries  to  what  we  may  hope  is  its  ultimate 
exaggeration  the  Rousseauistic  view  of  art, — the 
exaltation  of  motion  over  repose,  the  emphasis 
on  trance-like  illusion  and  pure  suggestiveness. 
He  tends  to  reduce  beauty  to  a  mere  process  of 
"  infeeling,"^  and  virtually  eliminates    any   over- 

'  For  Poe's  definition  of  both  beauty  and  poetry,  see  his  essay 
on  The  Poetic  Principle. 

*  yEst/ictik:  Psychologic  des  Schonen  ;  Telle  I,  II,  1903,  1906. 

'  Lipps's  process  of  Einfiihluttf^  is  closely  related  to  that  melt- 
ing of  man  into  outer  objects  in  a  sort  of  revery  which  I  have  dis- 

[  220  ] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

arching  law  of  symmetry  that  would  set  bounds  to 
all  this  subjectivity.  The  sense  of  law,  indeed,  as 
something  distinct  either  from  the  outer  rule  or 
individual  impulse  is,  as  I  have  already  said,  con- 
spicuously absent  from  the  whole  modern  move- 
ment. For  example,  the  neo-classicists  tended  to 
turn  the  laws  of  verse  into  a  set  of  narrow  precepts,' 
and  as  a  result  of  these  precepts  metre  became, 
especially  in  the  hands  of  the  smaller  men,  me- 
chanical, inflexible,  inexpressive.  We  are  familiar  in 
English  with  the  "  see-saw  "  of  the  couplet.  In  their 
reaction  from  this  formalism  many  of  the  partisans 
of  the  vers  libre  have  gone  to  the  opposite  extreme 
and  fallen  into  sheer  lawlessness.  They  have  been 
unwilling  to  allow  even  the  semblance  of  a  barrier 
to  their  spacious  dreams,  and  have  made  verse  so 
flexible  to  all  the  sinuosities  and  windings  of  their 
revery,  that  they  have  often  made  it  shapeless. 
They  have  succeeded  in  producing  something  that, 

cnssed  in  another  chapter.  An  article  on  Lipps  and  the  whole 
tendency  he  represents  will  be  found  in  the  Edinburgh  Review 
(Oct.,  1908)  under  the  title,  "  Beauty  and  Expression." 

'  Edward  Bysshe's  Art  of  English  Poetry  (Third  Edition,  1708) 
is  usually  taken  to  be  the  extreme  expression  of  this  tendency  in 
English. 

[221] 


THE  NEW  LAOKOON 

in  spite  of  M.  Jourdain's  classification,  is  neither 
verse  nor  prose ;  something  that  is  not  so  much  a 
confusion  of  the  genres  as  the  absence  of  any 
getire ;  "an  indescribable  something,"  says  M. 
Lemaitre,  applying  Bossuet's  phrase  about  the  hu- 
man corpse  after  it  has  reached  a  certain  degree  of 
decomposition,  "an  indescribable  something  that 
no  longer  has  a  name  in  any  language."'  Such  is 
the  last  stage  of  eleutheromania.  The  eleuthero- 
maniacs  of  poetry  are  in  the  same  class  as  the 
painters  who,  in  order  that  they  may  do  justice  to 
their  "  vision,"  are  forced,  as  they  would  have  us 
believe,  to  violate  the  most  indubitable  laws  of  de- 
sign ;  or  with  the  dramatists  who  dismiss  lightly, 
as  mere  conventions,  what  are  in  reality  convenient 
summings-up  of  the  universal  experience  of  man- 
kind. 

We  should  never  have  done  if  we  tried  to  notice 
all  the  ways  in  which  the  idea  of  beauty  has  been 
corrupted  by  those  who  would  make  it  purely  im- 

'  In  their  metrical  experiments,  as  in  so  many  otlier  respects, 
the  French  symbolists  were  anticipated  by  the  German  romanti- 
cists. Hettner  remarks  in  his  book  on  German  romanticism  (p.  59) 
that  "  the  poems  in  so-called  free  verse,  into  which  Tieck  espe- 
cially was  misled,  are  absolutely  unendurable." 
[  222  ] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

pressionistic  or  expressive.  One  of  the  most  inter- 
esting attempts  of  this  kind  is  that  of  the  NeapoHtan 
critic,  Benedetto  Croce,  whose  work  on  aesthetics  ' 
has  gone  through  several  editions  in  Italian,  and 
has  just  been  translated  into  English.  He  has  in- 
deed been  hailed  by  certain  enthusiasts  as  the  long- 
awaited  Messiah  of  aesthetics.  Signor  Croce  reduces 
beauty  to  pure  expression,^  not  so  much  by  eliminat- 
ing form  as  by  giving  the  word  form  a  meaning  of 
his  own,3  —  neither  the  Aristotelian  and  scholastic 
meaning,  nor,  again,  that  of  common  usage.  As  he 
defines  it,  form  is  a  mere  aspect,  the  inevitable  re- 
\sult,  as  it  were,  of  true  expression.  Art  has  to  do 
solely  with  the  fresh  intuitions  of  sense. ■♦  Interfer- 
ence with  these  intuitions  on  the  part  of  the  intel- 
lect is  to  be  deprecated.  The  higher,  or  so-called 
intellectual  intuitions,  Signor  Croce  denies.^  He 
discountenances  the  idea  of  selection  in  art.  The 
process  by  which  the  impressions  one  receives  are 
transmuted  and  finally  emerge  as  original  expres- 

'  Estetica  come  scienza  delP  espressione  e  lingtiistica  generate, 
1902.  My  references  are  to  the  first  edition. 

*  Estetica^  p.  81  :  "  noi  possiamo  definire  la  bellezza  come 
t  espressione  riuscita,o  meglio,  come  1'  espressione  sefiz^  altro"  etc. 

'  Ibid.,  p.  98.        *  Ibid.,  p.  137  3.11^.  passim.       '  Ibid.,  p.  68. 

[223] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

sion,  is  purely  intuitive  and  spontaneous,  and  be- 
yond  the  control  of  the  will.' 

In  short,  Signor  Croce  is  an  apostle  of  spon- 
taneity, but  it  is  the  lower  spontaneity,  —  the  spon- 
taneity of  instinct  and  not  that  of  insight.  His  point 
of  view  is  closely  related  to  that  special  form  of  re- 
action against  dogmatic  and  mechanical  science  of 
which  I  have  already  spoken.  He  shows  himself  one 
of  the  keenest  of  intellectualists  in  his  attacks  on 
scientific  intellectualism.  He  makes  many  a  trench- 
ant distinction  of  just  the  kind  that  we  need  at  pre- 
sent. I  therefore  regret  that  I  must  disagree  with 
him  so  gravely  in  fundamentals.  I  regret  that  he  has 
adopted  a  theory  of  beauty  that  almost  necessarily 
lays  him  under  the  suspicion  of  belonging  to  the 
class  of  people  of  whom  Dryden  speaks,  who  are 
ready  to  put  the  fool  upon  the  whole  world.  The 
conception  of  beauty  as  pure  expression  is  really 
very  modern.  In  order  to  maintain  it,  Signor  Croce 
has  to  part  company  with  Plato  and  Aristotle,  and 
in  general  rule  out  the  Greeks  as  incompetent  in  the 
theory  of  beauty.  It  is  only  when  he  gets  down  to 
comparatively  recent  times  that  he  finds  the  first 

*  Estetica,  p.  54. 
[224] 


FORM   AND    EXPRESSION 

glimmerings  of  the  vast  illumination  that  has  dawned 
upon  himself.'  With  his  expansive  view  of  beauty 
he  looks  upon  the  whole  attempt  to  set  up  literary 
and  artistic  genres  as  an  unwarranted  meddling  of 
the  intellect  with  aesthetic  spontaneity.^  All  the 
talk  that  has  gone  on  in  the  past  about  the  proper 
boundaries  of  the  arts,  and  the  confusion  of  the  arts, 
is,  as  he  would  have  us  believe,  a  mere  logomachy. ^ 

A  tempting  doctrine  plausible  and  new ! 
What  fools  our  fathers  were  if  this  be  true. 

We  should  not  fail  to  note  an  important  resem- 
blance between  the  pseudo-classicists  and  modern 
theorists  of  the  kind  I  have  been  discussing.  They 
all  agree  in  reducing  beauty  to  some  one  thing.  The 
pseudo-classicists  were  for  having  only  form,  and  so 
fell  into  formalism.  Many  of  the  moderns,  on  the 
other  hand,  discover  the  whole  of  beauty  in  those 
expressive  elements  that  the  pseudo-classicist  either 

*  The  first  person,  according  to  Signor  Croce,  who  "  penetrated 
the  true  nature  of  poetry  and  art"  {Estetica,-p.  228)  was  his  fellow 
NeapoHtan,  Giambattista  Vico  (1668-1744).  In  some  of  his  ideas 
about  the  spontaneous  and  primitive  Vico  m,ay  be  regarded  as  a 
precursor  of  Rousseau  and  Herder. 

'  Esteiica,  pp.  38-41,  147,  465-480. 

'  Ibid.,  p.  115. 

[225] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

minimized  or  denied.  Tiie  Abb6  Batteux  and  Si« 
gnor  Croce  are  both  aesthetic  monists,  the  difference 
being  that  Batteux  would  see  in  all  art  only  imita- 
tion, and  Croce  only  expression.  But  let  us  have 
a  wholesome  distrust  of  aesthetic  monists  as  well 
as  of  monists  of  every  kind.  Monism  is  merely 
a  fine  name  that  man  has  invented  for  his  own 
indolence  and  one-sidedness  and  unwillingness  to 
mediate  between  the  diverse  and  conflicting  aspects 
of  reality.  If  romanticists  and  naturalists,  no  less 
than  pseudo-classicists,  have  been  unable  to  distin- 
guish between  form  and  formalism,  and  so  have  tried 
to  reduce  beauty  to  some  one  thing,  there  is  no  rea- 
son why  we  should  be  like  them.  Any  sound  analy- 
sis of  beauty  will  always  recognize  two  elements, — 
an  element  that  is  expansive  and  vital  and  may  be 
summed  up  by  the  term  expression,  and  in  contrast 
to  this  an  element  of  form  that  is  felt  rather  as 
limiting  and  circumscribing  law. 

But  though  form  thus  limits  and  circumscribes, 
we  should  not  therefore  regard  it  as  something 
inert,  mechanical,  external  ;  we  should  not,  after  the 
pseudo-classic  and  romantic  fashion,  make  concen- 
tration synonymous  with  narrowness  and  contrac- 
[  226] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

tion,  with  tame  acquiescence  in  tradition  and  rou- 
tine. The  law  of  human  nature  as  distinct  from  the 
natural  law  is  itself  a  law  of  concentration ;  only 
this  law  should  be  held  flexibly  and  not  formally, 
and  this  feat,  though  difficult,  is  not  impossible  with 
the  aid  of  those  higher  intuitions  at  which  Signor 
Croce  sneers.  Art  of  course  cannot  thrive  solely, 
or  indeed  primarily,  on  the  higher  intuitions ;  it  re- 
quires the  keenest  intuitions  of  sense.  But  if  art  is 
to  have  humane  purpose,  these  intuitions  of  sense 
must  come  under  the  control  of  the  higher  intui- 
tions. Otherwise  art  is  in  danger  of  falling  into 
aimless  expression,  into  what  Lessing  calls  derwilde 
Ausdriick.  With  true  purpose  and  selection,  on  the 
other  hand,  art  may  achieve  form  and  essential 
symmetry.  Emerson  speaks  of  the  instantaneous 
dependence  of  form  upon  soul,  and  Spenser  says  in 
a  somewhat  similar  vein  that  "soul  is  form  and 
doth  the  body  make."  We  may  agree  with  Emerson 
and  Spenser  if  soul  is  taken  to  refer  to  the  region 
of  the  higher  intuitions  ;  but  it  is  evident  that  now- 
adays not  only  "  soul"  but  "ideal "  and  other  similar 
words  have  been  strangely  transformed,  that  they 
have  come  to  be  associated,  not  with  the  things  that 
[227] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

are  above  the  intellect,  but  with  the  things  that  are 
below  it,  with  what  I  have  called  the  lower  spon- 
taneity. We  have  seen  that  for  Lessing  an  ideal 
implied  a  somewhat  stern  process  of  selection  and 
self-discipline  with  reference  to  definite  standards. 
Since  Rousseau,  "soul"  and  "ideal"  do  not  conno- 
tate much  more  than  emotional  expansion.  A  man 
may  prove  that  he  has  "soul"  by  indulging  in  a 
gush  of  feeling,  and  pass  as  an  idealist  simply  by 
letting  loose  his  enthusiasm.  In  short,  the  words 
"soul"  and  "ideal"  have  already  been  so  feminized 
that  they  can  be  used  only  with  caution  and  may 
ultimately  become  impossible.  Indeed,  with  their 
elimination  of  the  principle  of  restraint  the  senti- 
mental naturalists  may  finally  discredit  all  the  higher 
values  of  human  nature  and  the  words  that  describe 
them,  until  nothing  is  left  erect  but  a  brutal  posi- 
tivism. 

Both  Spenser  and  Emerson  in  the  phrases  I  have 
just  quoted  are  consciously  Platonizing  ;  and  I  my- 
self have  associated  the  higher  intuitions  with  Plato. 
But  I  might  just  as  well  have  associated  them  with 
Aristotle  ;  for  it  is  a  fact  that  should  give  us  pause 
that  the  master  of  analysis  no  less  than  the  master 
[  228  ]  J; 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

of  synthesis  puts  his  final  emphasis  on  these  intui* 
tions.  Indeed,  the  form  this  insight  assumes  in 
Aristotle  is  often  more  to  our  purpose,  especially  in 
all  that  relates  to  art  and  literature,  than  the  form 
it  assumes  in  Plato.  For  example,  in  describing  the 
region  that  is  above  the  ordinary  intellect  Aristotle 
says  that  though  itself  motionless  it  is  the  source  of 
life  and  motion,'  a  conception  practically  realized 
one  may  say  in  Greek  sculpture  at  its  best,  which 
perfected  nearly  all  the  arts  of  suggesting  motion 
and  at  the  same  time  gave  to  this  motion  a  back- 
ground of  vital  repose.  Aristotle's  phrase  is  not  only 
admirable  in  itself,  but  it  puts  us  on  our  guard 
against  another  of  the  main  romantic  and  natural- 
istic confusions.  For  just  as  the  romanticists  would 
make  concentration  synonymous  with  narrowness 
and  contraction,  so  they  would  see  in  repose  only 
lifelessness  and  stagnation.  Thus  Herder  complains 
that  Lessing  in  setting  such  sharp  bounds  to  ex- 
pression would  make  "  art  dead  and  soulless  ;  it 
would  be  lost  in  an  inert  repose  that  could  please 
only  a  friar  of  the  Middle  Ages,"  ^  etc.  Now  I  for 

'  KiveT  ov  Kivoifjxvov  {Met.,  xii  (xiii),  7).     The  idea  is  of  courso 
found  in  many  other  passages  of  Aristotle. 

•  Erstes  kritisches  Wdldchen  (ed.  Suphan),  p.  76, 
[229] 


THE    NEW  LAOKOON 

one  should  not  deny  that  Lessing's  conception  of 
repose  is  in  some  respects  too  academic.  Yet  if  art 
is  to  be  complete,  it  must  have  not  only  expression 
but  form  that  circumscribes  this  expression  ;  and  in 
direct  proportion  as  the  form  is  genuine,  it  will  be 
suggestive  of  repose,  of  a  something  that  without 
being  in  the  least  inert  and  soulless  is  nevertheless 
raised  above  the  region  of  motion  and  change.  This 
perfect  union  of  form  and  expression  is  of  course 
rare ;  but  there  is  evidence  in  the  art  and  literature 
of  the  past  that  it  is  not  impossible.  Mozart,  for  ex- 
ample, ol)eys  musical  law  spontaneously,  being  in 
this  respect  at  the  opposite  pole  from  some  of  our 
modern  artists  who,  under  pretext  of  being  original 
and  expressive,  merely  succeed  in  violating  law 
laboriously.  If  true  art  consists  in  having  something 
to  say  and  then  saying  it  simply,  the  characteristic 
of  this  modern  art  is  to  have  nothing  to  say  and  then 
to  say  it  in  a  mysterious  and  complicated  manner. 
Expression  can  never  become  form  or  form  ex- 
pression any  more  than  expansion  can  become  con- 
centration or  the  centrifugal  the  centripetal.  But 
though  form  and  expression  can  never  be  actually 
merged,  it  is  plain  from  all  that  has  been  said  that 
[230] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

they  should  stand  toward  one  another  not  as  clashing 
antinomies  but  as  reconciled  opposites.  In  his  essay 
on  "  Beauty  "  Coleridge  gives  an  abstract  definition  of 
beauty  that  does  not  especially  concern  us,  and  then 
adds :  "In  the  concrete  beauty  is  the  union  of  the 
shapely  and  the  vital"  ;  and  this  is  very  much  to 
our  purpose.  Though  in  one  sense  the  shapely  must 
also  be  vital,  as  I  have  tried  to  show,  yet  Coleridge's 
phrase  remains  a  fair  statement,  perhaps  the  best 
in  English,  of  the  necessary  dualism  of  beauty.  The 
problem  of  mediating  between  the  two  terms  —  on 
the  one  hand,  the  outward  push  of  expression,  and 
on  the  other  the  circumscribing  law  —  is  one  that 
may  be  solved  in  innumerable  ways,  but  solved  in 
some  way  it  must  be,  if  beauty  is  to  be  achieved  that 
is  really  relevant  to  man.  This  problem  has  always 
been  present  to  those  who  have  thought  correctly 
about  art.  For  instance,  Horace  was  thinking  of 
some  such  contrast  when  he  wrote,  "It  is  not  enough 
for  poems  to  be  polished,  let  them  also  have  charm 
and  lead  the  mind  of  the  reader  wherever  they  will."  *^ 

I  Non  satis  est  pulchra  esse  poemata  :  dulcia  sunto, 
£t  quocumque  volent,  animum  auditoris  agunto. 

Pulcker  x&iexs  in  Latin  to  the  formal  virtues.. 
[231  ] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

Nowadays,  if  a  poem  enthralled  us  in  the  way  Horace 
describes,  we  should  call  it  beautiful  without  any  more 
ado ;  but  Horace  was  too  civilized  to  be  guilty  of  any 
such  one-sidedness.  For  extremes  are  barbarous, 
and  if  an  artist  lean  too  one-sidedly  toward  either  the 
shapely  or  the  vital,  he  is  in  danger  of  ceasing  to 
be  humane.  There  is  no  doubt  as  to  the  extreme 
toward  which  we  are  inclining  to-day.  One  of  the 
English  reviews  recently  praised  as  the  greatest 
work  of  genius  of  the  last  quarter-century  Thomas 
Hardy's  "  Dynasts,"  —  a  drama  in  three  parts,  nine- 
teen acts,  and  one  hundred  and  thirty  scenes,  and  at 
the  same  time  a  medley  of  prose  and  verse  (and  very 
bad  verse  at  that).  Now  "The  Dynasts"  is  a  work 
of  genius  no  doubt,  but  of  undisciplined  genius 
surely.  Though  vital  it  is  certainly  not  shapely.  In 
fact,  a  few  more  such  performances  might  reconcile 
us  to  a  little  Aristotelian  formalism.  To  take  an  ex- 
ample from  another  field,  Rodin's  "Belle  qui  fut 
Heaulmi^re"  may  be  vital  but  can  scarcely  be  re- 
garded as  shapely.  In  general,  Rodin  and  other  im- 
pressionistic sculptors  are  straining  so  hard  to  be 
vital  and  expressive  that  they  are  in  danger  of  over- 
stepping the  bounds  of  their  art,  of  violating  its 
[  232  ] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

special  form  and  symmetry/  and  so  of  failing  to 
temper  their  rendering  of  life  and  motion  with  a 
sufHcient  suggestion  of  repose.  The  whole  world 
seems  to  be  growing  increasingly  barbaric  in  this 
matter  of  symmetry.  I  have  actually  heard  the  epithet 
beautiful  applied  to  sky-scrapers.  Now  sky-scrapers 
may  be  picturesque,  or  vital,  or  what  you  will,  though 
they  are  usually  not  much  more  than  a  mixture  of 
megalomania  and  commercialism.  But  even  though 
they  did  express  fully  the  race  of  industrial  and 
financial  Titans  that  now  has  us  in  its  grip,  they 
would  still  fall  short  of  being  beautiful.  For  Titan- 
ism  is  too  unmeasured  and  unrestrained  to  represent 

'  There  is  still  something  to  be  said  after  Lessing  and  so  many 
others  on  the  boundaries  that  are  imposed  on  each  art  by  its  own 
special  technique,  the  material  in  which  it  works,  its  relations  to 
time  and  space,  etc.  I  am  of  course  approaching  the  subject 
from  an  entirely  different  angle.  Those  who  are  interested  in  the 
other  avenue  of  approach  will  find  good  material  in  Ludwig 
Volkmann's  Grenzen  der  Kiinste  (1903),  a  book  that  turns  to 
account  the  conclusions  of  other  recent  German  theorists  (espe- 
cially A.  Hildebrand  and  A.  Schmarsow).  Volkmann  attacks 
Rodin  (pp.  81  ff.)  for  confusing  at  times  the  standards  of  painting 
and  sculpture.  This  impressionistic  confusion  of  painting  and 
sculpture  often  resembles  the  pseudo-classic  confusion  of  the  two 
arts  in  producing  (at  least  on  the  eye  that  is  untrained  techni- 
cally) an  effect  of  writhing  theatricality. 

[233  ] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

at  best  more  than  one  of  the  two  terms  that  must  be 
reconciled  in  true  beauty.  Contrast  with  lower  New 
York  the  perspectives  that  open  up  from  the  Place 
de  la  Concorde  at  Paris.  The  Parisian  symmetry  is 
perhaps  not  sufficiently  subtle ;  it  is  still  too  rem- 
iniscent of  the  kind  that  may  be  constructed  with 
a  rule  and  compass,  yet  by  virtue  of  it  this  part  of 
Paris  makes  a  vastly  closer  approach  to  the  beau- 
tiful than  anything  in  lower  New  York. 

But  it  is  vain  to  talk  of  form  and  symmetry  to 
the  pure  expansionist.  As  I  have  said,  he  tends 
to  identify  repose  with  inertia  and  concentration 
with  narrowness.  He  would  have  us  believe  that 
art  must  aim  exclusively  at  the  vital  and  expres- 
sive, or  else  be  fatally  condemned  to  remain  in  a 
rut  of  imitation  and  go  on  repeating  the  same 
stereotyped  forms.  This  is  the  fallacy  at  the 
bottom  of  a  very  celebrated  piece  of  writing  of 
Renan's,  —  his  "Prayer  on  the  Acropolis."  Renan 
here  expresses,  in  language  that  is  itself  a  model  of 
form,  ideas  that  are  a  denial  of  all  the  formal  vir- 
tues. He  begins  after  the  romantic  wont  by  an 
outburst  of  sympathy  and  comprehension  for  the 
Parthenon  and  the  Athenians  and  Pallas  Athene; 
[234] 


FORM  AND   EXPRESSION 

and  then  enthusiasm  gives  way  to. the  reflection 
that  the  followers  of  Athene  and  of  classical  per- 
fection would  after  all  confine  the  human  spirit  in 
the  pinfold  of  some  special  form ;  they  would  neg- 
lect the  infinite  expressiveness  and  suggestiveness 
of  other  varieties  of  art.  They  would  know  nothing 
beyond  reason  and  good  sense.  But  the  world  is 
greater  than  they  suppose,  and  so  some  day  they 
will  come  to  be  regarded  as  the  "disciples  of  en- 
nui." "  If  thou  hadst  seen  the  snows  of  the  pole 
and  the  mysteries  of  the  austral  sky,"  says  Renan 
to  Athene,  "  thy  brow,  O  goddess  ever  calm,  would 
not  be  so  serene,  thy  head  more  capacious  would 
embrace  divers  kinds  of  beauty." 

One  could  not  wish  a  better  example  of  the  ro- 
mantic tendency  to  regard  as  an  outer  form  what 
is  in  reality  an  inner  discipline,  in  other  words  to 
confuse  form  with  formalism.  If  the  Parthenon 
has  value,  it  is  only  as  an  adumbration  of  some- 
thing higher  than  itself  or  any  number  of  particu- 
lar forms,  of  the  law  of  unity,  measure,  purpose. 
Having  got  rid  of  the  outer  form,  Renan  would 
at  the  same  time  be  rid  of  the  inner  discipline 
and  of  everything  that  opposes  itself  to  expansion, 
[235] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

to  an  infinite  and  indeterminate  vagabondage  of 
intellect  and  sensibility.  He  arrives,  as  every  con- 
sistent naturalist  must,  at  pure  transformism ;  that 
is,  he  sees  everything  passing  over  into  everything 
else  by  almost  insensible  gradations.  There  is  no 
place  in  the  process  for  the  sharply  drawn  line  of 
demarcation,  for  the  firm  and  fast  distinction. 
Definite  standards  are  swallowed  up  in  a  universal 
relativity.  "A  philosophy  doubtless  per\'erse,"  says 
Renan,  "has  led  me  to  believe  that  good  and  evil, 
pleasure  and  pain,  beauty  and  ugliness,  reason  and 
madness,  are  transformed  into  one  another  by  shades 
as  imperceptible  as  those  on  the  neck  of  a  dove." 
Thus  Renan's  motto  in  dealing  with  ideas  is  like 
that  of  Verlaine  in  dealing  with  sensations,  la  nu- 
ance, la  nuance  toujours.  Dr.  Johnson  says  we 
should  "neglect  the  minuter  discriminations"  and 
"not  number  the  streaks  of  the  tulip."  l^ut  that 
is  just  what  the  whole  modern  school  has  been 
doing.  This  has  meant  in  practice  the  exaltation 
of  the  feminine  over  the  masculine  powers  of  per- 
sonality, and  so  the  exercise  of  faculties  in  them- 
selves necessary  and  legitimate  has  assumed  the 
aspect  of  a  decadence,  of  what  M.  Lasserre  calls 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

"an  integral  corruption  of  the  higher  parts  of  hu- 
man nature." 

Thus  the  "Prayer  on  the  Acropolis,"  probably 
the  most  brilliant  piece  of  prose  written  during  the 
second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  turns  out, 
when  examined  from  the  humanistic  point  of  view, 
to  involve  a  fallacy.  We  may  note  here,  as  closely 
related  to  Renan's  fallacy,  the  incalculable  harm 
that  is  done  to  art  and  literature  by  a  certain 
conception  of  progress.  The  doctrine  of  progress 
is  often  interpreted  to  mean  that  man  grows  by 
moving  in  one  direction,  whereas  man  actually  grows 
by  moving  in  different  directions  simultaneously ; 
that  is  by  mediating  between  various  half-truths 
and  partial  glimpses  of  reality.  For  example,  it  is 
proclaimed  that  the  music  of  Richard  Strauss  is 
an  advance  over  that  of  Wagner,  that  it  has  still 
greater  expressiveness  and  stands  for  a  still  ampler 
freedom.  At  these  glad  tidings  the  innumerable 
army  of  faddists  hastens  to  join  the  procession. 
But  there  may  be  still  a  few  persons  who  are  not 
content  merely  to  keep  up  with  the  procession  but 
who  would  also  like  to  know  where  the  procession 
is  going,  —  whether  it  is  headed  toward  some  hu- 
[237] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

mane  goal  or  is  simply  getting  farther  and  farther 
out  toward  the  extreme  tip  of  what  Sainte-Beuve 
calls  the  romantic  Kamchatka.  Now  our  present 
subject  is  a  sort  of  watch-tower  from  which  we  can 
sweep  a  wide  horizon  and  so  form  some  conjecture 
as  to  the  contemporary  movement  and  its  direction. 
It  is  plain  from  all  I  have  said  that  I  myself  would 
conclude  from  a  survey  of  this  kind  that  what  we 
are  now  seeing  in  nearly  all  fields  of  human  en- 
deavor, in  art  and  philosophy  and  education,  is  a 
violent  extreme,  —  the  extreme  of  scientific  and 
sentimental  naturalism.  Of  course  the  present 
movement  may  continue  indefinitely.  We  may  have 
theories  about  education  still  more  undisciplinary 
than  the  radical  forms  of  the  elective  system,  a  still 
more  pathological  outpouring  of  fiction  to  the  ex- 
clusion of  the  other  literary  genres,  sculpture  still 
more  impressionistic  than  that  of  Rodin  and  his  dis- 
ciples, music  still  more  given  up  to  the  pursuit  of 
overtones  and  iridescences  than  that  of  Debussy, 
philosophy  even  more  careless  of  rationality  than 
that  of  the  pragmatists,  ideas  about  art  still  more 
subversive  of  the  element  of  symmetry  in  beauty 
than  those  of  Lipps  and  Croce.  In  short,  the  process 
[238] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

of  dehumanizing  life  and  literature  may  go  on  for- 
ever ;  —  it  may,  but  we  should  not  count  on  it,  es- 
pecially if  the  French  saying  be  true,  that  good 
sense  is  the  genius  of  humanity.  In  the  past  reac- 
tions have  been  known  to  occur  against  extremes  of 
this  kind,  and  they  have  occasionally  been  sudden. 
Even  the  faddist  should  therefore  temper  his  eager- 
ness to  keep  up  with  the  procession  with  some 
thought  of  the  danger  of  coming  in  at  the  very  end 
of  any  movement ;  as  the  Spanish  proverb  says,  the 
last  monkey  gets  drowned.  For  over  a  century  now 
there  has  been  an  almost  exclusive  play  of  centrifu- 
gal forces  ;  of  exploration  into  the  remote  and  outly- 
ing regions  of  nature  and  human  nature.  Some  day, 
perhaps  not  remote,  there  may  be  a  counter-move- 
ment toward  the  centre.  In  short,  to  revert  to  a  psy- 
chological theory  I  have  already  used,  the  world 
may  now  be  menaced  by  a  "subliminal  uprush"  of 
common  sense — however  alarming  this  prospect 
may  be  to  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  and  his  followers. 

But  all  such  prophecy  is  vain ;  everything  de- 
pends on  leadership,  and  one  can  never  say  whether 
the  right  persons  will  take  the  trouble  to  be  born. 
In  this  sense  we  may  agree  for  once  with  Victor 
[239] 


THE   NEW   LAOKOON 

Hugo,  that  the  future  belongs  to  God.  It  is  of 
course  far  from  certain  that  the  world  will  ever 
see  another  humanistic  era.  For  example,  Sainte- 
Beuve,  who  was  eminent  both  as  a  humanist  and 
a  naturalist,  inclined  to  think  that  France  had 
already  had  her  classic  age  and  was  now  on  the 
descending  slopes  of  decadence,  where  it  was  already 
difficult  and  might  soon  become  impossible  to  have 
any  glimpse  of  true  beauty.'  Sainte-Beuve  was  per- 
haps too  much  haunted  by  this  notion  of  the  classic 
age,  —  the  notion  that  a  country  like  an  individual 
has  its  period  of  childhood,  and  adolescence  and 
full  maturity  and  senile  decay.  This  is  another 
"biological  analogy"  that  I  for  one  distrust  pro- 
foundly. If  we  must  have  a  theory,  the  theory  of 
the  saving  remnant  might  be  more  to  our  purpose 
than  that  of  the  classic  age.  Any  one  who  makes 
a  stand  for  a  humane  and  vital  concentration  may 

'  For  Sainte-Beuve's  ideas  on  this  subject, see  especially  Chatean- 
briatid et son  i^roupe  litt'eraire, passim.  The  first  influential  applica- 
tion of  the  idea  of  the  classic  age  to  France  is  that  of  Voltaire  in 
his  Slide  de  Louis  A'/F  (chaps,  i  andxxxii).  Voltaire  himself  was 
probably  influenced  by  the  Abbe  Du  Bos,  who  sets  forth  the 
whole  theory  at  great  length,  translating  the  inevitable  passage  at 
the  end  of  Velleius  Paterculus  {Reflexions  Critiques^  2°  partie, 
sects.  12-14). 

[  240] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

perhaps,  with  somewhat  less  than  the  normal 
amount  of  illusion,  look  on  himself  as  belonging  to 
the  saving  remnant ;  he  may  at  least  be  sure  that 
he  belongs  to  an  infinitesimal  minority.  What 
Matthew  Arnold  would  call  the  "  elephantine  main 
body"  seems  more  convinced  than  ever  that  man, 
to  become  perfect,  has  only  to  continue  indefinitely 
the  programme  of  the  nineteenth  century, — that 
is,  to  engage  in  miscellaneous  expansion  and  back  it 
up  if  need  be  with  noisy  revolt  against  all  the  forms 
of  the  past.  Any  one  who  holds  a  different  view 
is  set  down  at  once  as  a  mere  laggard  and  reaction- 
ary. But  the  man  who  is  urging  humane  concentra- 
tion may  rather  regard  himself  as  a  pioneer  and 
leader  of  a  forlorn  hope,  whereas  the  true  laggard  — 
and  a  dangerous  laggard  at  that  —  may  turn  out  to 
be  the  apostle  of  everlasting  expansion,  the  kind  of 
man  who  may  be  defined  as  the  nineteenth  century 
that  is  unwilling  to  complete  itself.  For  this  kind 
of  man  is  rendering  inevitable  a  concentration  that 
will  not  be  humane,  but  of  the  military  and  im- 
perialistic type  peculiar  to  epochs  of  decadence. 
When  the  traditional  checks  and  inhibitions  finally 
disappear  and  elan  vital  gets  under  way  on  a  grand 
[241  ] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

scale,  with  no  countervailing  frein  vital,  the  only 
law  that  can  decide  which  nation  or  which  individ- 
ual is  to  expand  vitally  and  unrestrained  is  the  law 
of  cunning  or  the  law  of  force.'  Such  is  the  in- 
evitable upshot  of  a  pure  naturalism. 

Dark  as  is  the  outlook  for  the  humanist,  there 
are  nevertheless  some  signs  that  the  crest  of  the 
naturalistic  wave  has  already  been  reached  and  that 
from  now  on  we  may  expect  some  subsidence.  On 
the  sentimental  side  the  naturalistic  movement  first 
found  significant  expression  in  the  theory  of  the 
spontaneous  and  the  primitive,  and  in  one  quarter, 
at  least,  the  origin  of  the  epic,  romantic  primitivism 
is  plainly  waning.  We  have  seen  that  the  neo- 
classic  exaggeration  in  regard  to  the  epic,  as  well  as 
the  o\.\i^x  genres,  was  to  turn  it  into  a  cold  and  de- 
liberate concoction  of  the  intellect.  Buckingham,  for 
instance,  was  convinced  that   Le  Bossu,  the  chief 

'  The  humanitarian  will  of  course  reply  that  all  this  expansion 
will  be  sufficiently  tempered  by  an  increase  in  altruism.  Unfortu- 
nately the  evidence  is  as  yet  rather  scanty  that  the  human  nature 
of  the  future  is  going  to  differ  so  radically  from  the  human  nature 
of  the  past.  To  illustrate  concretely,  the  growth  of  international 
good  will  does  not  seem  to  reassure  the  English  entirely  regarding 
the  vital  expansion  of  Germany. 

[  242] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

neo-classic  authority  on  the  epic,  had  explained 
the  "mighty  magic"  of  Homer.  The  counter-ex- 
aggeration of  the  romanticists  was  to  eliminate  the 
element  of  conscious  and  deliberate  art  and  make 
of  the  Homeric  poems  an  almost  unconscious  ema- 
nation of  the  folk-soul.  The  opinion  is  now  gain- 
ing ground  that  the  Iliad  and  Odyssey  are  not 
primitive  but  works  of  consummate  art,  though  the 
word  art,  of  course,  is  not  understood  in  quite 
the  same  sense  as  by  Le  Bossu.  We  can  even  see 
the  beginnings  of  reaction  against  primitivism  in 
the  latest  theories  as  to  the  origin  of  the  mediaeval 
epic. 

The  decay  of  the  romantic  theory  of  the  primi- 
tive and  the  spontaneous  has  important  possibili- 
ties. This  theory  is  responsible  in  no  small  measure 
for  the  mortal  debility  of  intellect  and  character  and 
will  that  is  so  evident  in  one  whole  side  of  the- 
modern  movement.  We  all  know  what  this  Rous- 
seauistic  side  of  romanticism  has  come  to  in  its  last 
pitiful  representatives,  —  an  Oscar  Wilde  or  Paul 
Verlaine.  The  latest  romanticists  have  discredited 
themselves,  which  is  not  perhaps  a  serious  matter ; 
but  they  have  also  thrown  a  certain  discredit  oiv  art 
[243] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

and  literature,  and  this  is  far  more  serious.  Think 
of  the  meaning  that  is  coming  to  be  attached  in 
popular  usage  to  the  phrase  "  artistic  temperament." 
The  most  urgent  task  just  now  is  to  react  against 
the  comparative  neglect  of  the  intellect  and  of  what 
is  above  the  intellect,  which  assumes  so  many  forms 
in  Rousseauism.  The  man  of  letters  should  not  be 
so  modest  as  to  leave  all  the  analytical  keenness 
and  intellectual  virility  to  the  scientist.  Art  cannot 
live  on  intellectualism,  yet  the  pathway  to  the  kind 
of  creative  art  we  need  lies  through  the  intellect. 
So  far  from  fighting  shy  of  the  "false  secondary 
power  by  which  we  multiply  distinctions,"  we  should 
make  as  many  and  as  clear  distinctions  as  possible 
and  then  project  them  like  vivid  sunbeams  into  the 
romantic  twilight.  That  indeed  should  be  the  func- 
tion of  criticism  at  the  present  hour,  —  to  bring 
once  more  into  honor  the  broad,  masculine,  and  vig- 
orous distinction.  We  might  then  have  a  type  of 
writing  that  is  not  intended  primarily  for  women 
and  men  in  their  unmasculine  moods,  —  for  the  tired 
scientist  and  the  fagged  philologist  and  the  weary 
man  of  business. 

The  revival  of  the  firm  and  masculine  distinction 
[  244] 


FORM  AND   EXPRESSION 

can  alone  save  us  from  the  confusions  that  have 
crept  into  modern  life  and  literature  and  that  I 
have  traced  to  two  main  sources,  —  emotional  unre- 
straint and  pseudo-science.  To  take  an  illustration 
almost  at  random,  think  how  much  of  both  enters 
into  Zola's  theory  and  practice  of  the  novel.  The 
pseudo-scientist  sees  only  flux  and  motion,  not  only 
on  the  physical  but  also  on  the  human  plane,  with 
no  clearly  defined  frontiers  anywhere.  He  thus  co- 
operates in  a  way  with  the  romantic  eleutheromaniac 
who  wants  unlimited  emotional  expansion.  But,  as 
I  have  already  said,  if  emotion  is  to  be  humanized 
it  must  become  selective,  and  in  direct  proportion 
as  it  becomes  selective  it  ceases  to  be  indetermi- 
nate :  it  acquires  aim  and  purpose,  form  and  pro- 
portion. The  mere  outward  push  of  expression  does 
not  by  itself  suffice.  The  object  on  which  expres- 
sion expends  itself  must  be  intrinsically  worth  while, 
and  this  is  a  point  that  must  be  determined  on  other 
and  higher  grounds  than  individual  feeling.  We 
have  here  the  truth  that  underlies  what  is  appar- 
ently one  of  the  worst  of  the  neo-classic  pedantries, 
—  the  hierarchy  of  the  genres.  The  genre  is  to  be 
ranked  according  to  the  intrinsic  value  and  impor- 
[245] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

tance  for  man  of  the  matter  it  treats.  Because  the 
neo-classicists  turned  this  truth  into  mere  conven- 
tionahty  there  is  no  reason,  let  me  repeat,  why  we 
should  be  like  them.  The  essential  thing,  says  Aris- 
totle speaking  of  tragedy,  is  to  get  a  good  plot,  and 
good  plots  are  not  easy  to  come  at.  According  to 
the  romanticists  almost  any  outer  incident  will  do 
if  we  only  feel  strongly  enough  about  it.  If  the 
emotional  reaction  is  right,  we  shall,  as  Words- 
worth admonishes  us,  "find  a  tale  in  everything." 
An  old  man  hacking  vainly  at  a  root  with  his 
mattock  will  then  seem  to  us  as  fit  a  subject  for 

poetry  as 

Thebes,  or  Pelops'  line, 
Or  the  tale  of  Troy  divine. 

Wordsworth's  paradox,  like  many  other  para- 
doxes, has  its  own  truth  and  usefulness,  but  the 
man  who  holds  it  is  prone  to  fall  into  what  M.  Las- 
serre  calls  Vonphase  romantiqtie,  romantic  fustian ; 
which  may  be  defined  as  the  enormous  dispropor- 
tion between  emotion  and  the  outer  object  or  in- 
cident on  which  it  expends  itself.  Victor  Hugo 
abounds  in  fustian  of  this  kind.  A  good  example  of 
musical  fustian  is  Richard  Strauss's  "  Domestic 
[  246  ] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

Symphony."  The  disproportion  here  between  ex- 
pression and  what  is  expressed  is  so  obvious  that 
one  critic  charitably  hints  at  mental  derangement. 
I  read  in  one  of  the  accounts  of  this  composition 
that  there  are  required  for  its  performance,  in  ad- 
dition to  the  usual  strings,  "  two  harps,  four  flutes, 
two  oboes,  one  oboe  d'amore,  four  clarinets,  one  bass 
clarinet,  four  bassoons,  one  double  bassoon,  four 
saxophones,  eight  horns,  four  trumpets,  three  trom- 
bones, one  bass  tuba,  four  kettle-drums,  triangle, 
tambourine,  glockenspiel,  cymbals  and  big  drum," 

—  and  all  to  describe  the  incidents  of  baby's  bath  ! ' 
After  all,  there  is  no  great  mystery  about  this 

question  of  the  genres  and  the  boundaries  of  the 
arts  if  we  consider  it  vitally  and  not  formally.  It 
reduces  itself  to  this  :  a  clear-cut  type  of  person,  a 
person  who  does  not  live  in  either  an  emotional  or 
an  intellectual  muddle,  will  normally  prefer  a  clear- 
cut  type  of  art  or  literature.  Thus  he  is  not  likely 
to  care  for  a  theatrical   sermon   or   a  play   that 

'  I  should  add  that  all  the  admirers  of  Strauss  are  not  agreed 
about  this  describing  of  baby's  bath.  The  Domestic  Symphony 
can  scarcely  be  so  interpreted  however  as  to  affect  my  main  thesis, 

—  that  there  is  a  great  deal  of  expression  here  compared  with  the 
intrinsic  importance  of  what  is  expressed. 

[247] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

preaches.  In  many  historical  novels  he  will  feel 
that  history  is  travestied  without  any  correspond- 
ing gain  for  fiction.  He  will  be  partial  to  music 
that  is  first  of  all  music  and  to  poetry  that  is  above 
all  poetry.  He  will  distrust  a  symphony  that 
becomes  intelligible  only  with  reference  to  some 
picture  or  poem.  He  will  not  ordinarily  care  for  a 
painting  that  is  merely  a  symbolical  transposition  of 
a  sonnet,  or  a  sonnet  that  is  a  symbolical  transpo- 
sition of  a  painting.  He  will  desire  each  art  and 
e.vQxy genre  to  be  itself  primarily,  and  to  give,  as  Ar- 
istotle says  of  tragedy,  its  own  special  pleasure.  This 
is  the  one  serious  argument  against  tragi-comedy, 
that  in  trying  to  give  the  special  pleasure  of  both 
tragedy  and  comedy  it  may  fail  of  the  fullest  unity 
of  impression.  A  unified  impression  cannot  be  ob- 
tained without  some  degree  of  concentration,  rele- 
vancy, purpose.  This  chief  emphasis  on  the  mas- 
culine elements  in  art  need  not  imply  any  disdain 
for  the  feminine  virtues,  or  lead  to  an  academic 
excess  of  gray  design.  Right  design  is  the  first  re- 
quirement, but  there  should  also  be  color  and 
movement  and  illusion,  and,  in  general,  expressive- 
ness —  the  more  the  better.  Each  art  and  genre 
[248] 


FORM  AND   EXPRESSION 

may  be  as  suggestive  as  it  can  of  other  arts  and 
genres^  while  remaining  true  to  its  own  form  and 
proportion.  But  to  set  color  above  design,  illusion 
above  informing  purpose,  suggestiveness  above 
symmetry,  is  to  encourage  that  predominance  of 
the  feminine  over  the  masculine  virtues  that  has 
been  the  main  cause  of  the  corruption  of  literature 
and  the  arts  during  the  past  century,  —  what  one 
may  in  fact  term  the  great  romantic,  or  it  might 
be  more  correct  to  say  Rousseauistic,  error. 

Though  the  clear-cut  type  of  person  will  incline 
toward  the  clear-cut  type  of  art,  the  genre  tranche, 
— he  will  be  guided  in  deciding  what  is  sufficiently 
clear-cut  and  what  is  an  unjustifiable  hybrid,  by 
tact  and  a  sense  of  measure  and  not  by  any  rule  of 
thumb.  Matthew  Arnold,  commenting  on  the  mess 
Wordsworth  made  of  his  attempt  to  classify  his 
poetry  on  a  new  plan,  remarks  that  the  Greeks  dis- 
played an  almost  infallible  tact  in  making  distinctions 
of  this  kind ;  and  we  may  add  that  they  showed  their 
tact  not  only  in  the  genres  they  established,  but 
in  holding  these  classifications  fluidly.  In  Greek 
tragedy,  for  example,  there  is  a  free  interplay  and 
cooperation  of  the  different  arts  and  genres ;  they 

[249] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

are  separated  only  by  a  slender  and  sinuous  thread, 
as  Andre  Chenier  says,  but  a  thread  that  is  never 
broken. 

In  short,  the  Greeks  at  their  best  had  humane 
standards  and  held  them  flexibly.  They  thus  effected 
in  some  degree  that  mediation  between  the  One  and 
the  Many  that  is  the  highest  wisdom  of  life.  This 
is  an  achievement  so  difficult  for  a  lover  of  half- 
uruths,  like  man,  that  we  still  have  to  look  to  Greece 
for  our  chief  evidence  that  it  is  possible  at  all.  The 
actual  forms  in  which  the  Greek  embodied  his  media- 
tion between  extremes  are  relative  and  need  not  be 
literally  revived ;  but  though  relative,  as  particular 
forms  must  always  be,  they  point  the  way  to  laws 
that  are  absolute.  The  man  of  our  own  time  who 
really  learned  the  lesson  of  Greek  life  might  produce 
work  that  had  little  outer  likeness  to  the  Parthenon 
or  a  play  of  Sophocles  or  a  dialogue  of  Plato,  but  his 
work  would  resemble  these  Greek  forms  in  having 
vital  unity,  vital  measure,  vital  purpose.  I  am  not 
of  course  urging  any  blind  worship  of  the  Greeks  or 
under\^aluing  all  that  has  amplified  and  enriched 
human  life  since  classical  antiquity.  As  a  whole 
Greek  life  may  serve  as  a  warning  at  least  as  much 
[  250] 


FORM   AND   EXPRESSION 

as  an  example,  but  the  warning  is  no  less  relevant 
to  our  contemporary  world  than  the  example.  The 
critical  moment  of  Greek  life  was,  like  the  present, 
a  period  of  naturalistic  emancipation,  when  the  multi- 
tude was  content  to  live  without  standards,  and  the 
few  were  groping  for  inner  standards  to  take  the 
place  of  the  outer  standards  they  had  lost.  The 
Greek  problems  were  like  our  own,  problems  of  un- 
restraint ;  for  what  we  see  on  every  hand  in  our 
modern  society,  when  we  get  beneath  its  veneer  of 
scientific  progress,  is  barbaric  violation  of  the  law 
of  measure.  Greek  society  perished,  as  our  modern 
society  may  very  well  perish,  from  an  excess  of 
naturalism;  but  Greek  art  at  its  best  is  a  triumph 
of  humane  restraint.  Therefore  both  in  its  failures 
and  its  success,  Greece,  especially  the  Greece  of 
Socrates  and  Plato  and  the  Sophists,  is  rich  in  in- 
struction for  us,  —  more  so,  I  am  inclined  to  think, 
than  any  other  period  of  the  past  whatsoever.  This 
is  the  very  moment  that  we  are  choosing  to  turn 
away  from  the  study  of  Greek.  One  might  sup- 
pose that  before  deserting  the  exeviplaria  grceca 
it  would  be  wiser  to  wait  until  the  world  has  an- 
other age  that  proves  as  clearly  as  did  the  great 
[251] 


THE   NEW  LAOKOON 

age  of  Greece  that  man  may  combine  an  exquisite 
measure  with  a  perfect  spontaneity,  that  he  may 
be  at  once  thoroughly  disciplined  and  thoroughly 
inspired. 

I  trust  that  I  have  at  least  justified  in  this  book 
the  statement  I  made  at  the  beginning,  that  an 
inquiry  into  the  nature  of  the  £-e7ires  and  the  boun- 
daries of  the  arts  is  far-reaching  and  involves  one's 
attitude  not  merely  toward  literature  but  toward 
life.  To  treat  the  question  exhaustively  would  re- 
quire a  grasp  of  general  principles  and  at  the  same 
time  a  knowledge  of  each  separate  art  and  its  his- 
tory to  which  I  for  one  make  no  claim.  I  have  not 
even  tried  to  be  exhaustive  in  this  sense.  I  have 
aspired  at  most  to  be  a  humble  imitator  of  Lessing 
in  his  endeavor,  not  to  achieve  a  complete  and 
closed  system,  but  to  scatter  the  fcrmenta  cogni- 
tionis. 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Academy,  The  French,  8. 
Addison,  Dialogues  on  Medals, 

32- 

Apuleius,  73. 

Ariosto,  30  n,  49,  152,  192. 

Aristotle,  5  ff.,  9  ff.,  13,  17,  20, 
38  ff.,  45,  66  f.,  76,  85,  87  f., 
no,  115,  195,  215,  224,  228  f., 
246,  248  ;  Poetics,  4  ff.,  17,  37 
f.,  190. 

Arnold,  Matthew,  44,  64,  81,  95, 
130,  142,  241,  249;  Epilogue 
to  Lessing's  Laokoon,  45. 

Assezat,  118  n. 

Athendum,  124. 

Bade,  78. 

Bacon,  102,  104,  127;  Advance- 
ment of  Leartting,  102. 

Barat,  E.,  18  n. 

Barine,  Arvede,  141  n. 

Batteux,  Abbe,  8,  14  f.,  17,  23  n, 
226;  Beaux- A  rts  reduits  ^  un 
metne  Priiicipe,  9,  77  n. 

Baudelaire,  112,  133,  159,  172 
n,  177  ff. 

Bayle,  P.,  43. 

Beethoven,  134  n,  173, 184;  Pas- 
toral Symphony,  164  f. 

Bekker,  J.  de,  173  n. 

Bergson,  H.,  129,  212  f. 

Berlioz,  H.,  160,  165  f.,  167  f . ; 
Harold  en  Italie,  Pequiem 
Mass,  Symphonie  fantastique, 
166. 


Bernini,  58  n. 

Bertin,  Edouard,  148. 

Bertrand,  L.,  34  n. 

Blair,  Dr.,  112  n. 

Blake,  William,  81. 

Bliimner,  Hugo,  viii,  46  n,  51  n, 

52  f. 
Boccaccio,  130. 
Bocklin,  Arnold,  162. 
Boileau,  4  n,  30,  40  ff.,  63,  73, 

76  f.,  156  n,  190. 
Bossuet,  222. 
Braitmaier,  F.,  34  n. 
Brandes,  G.,  157  n. 
Browne,  Sir  Thomas,  95  f. 
Bninetiere,  F.,  215. 
Biichmann,  61  n. 
Buckingham,  242. 
Buffon,  144. 
Burke,  E.,  195. 
Byron,  98,  104,  197. 
Bysshe,  Edward,  221  n. 

Castel,  Father,  53  ff.,  118,  122. 

184. 
Caylus,  Count  de,  53 ;  Pictures 

Drawn  from  Homer,  33. 
Chapelain,  8  n,  41  f.,  63. 
Chateaubriand,  141  ff.,  154. 
Chenier,  Andre,  198,  250. 
Chesterfield,  43. 
Chopin,  163. 
Cicero,  61. 
Claude,  128. 
Coleridge,  24,  65  n,  72,  87,  113, 


[255] 


INDEX 


125,    127,   132;  Fragment  of 
an  Essay  on  Beauty,  231. 

Combarieu,  J.,  157  n. 

Constantine,  144. 

Corot,  165. 

Counter-Reformation,  7. 

Cowper,  William,  25. 

Croce,  Benedetto,  223  ff.,  238. 

Danielle,  10,  20;  Poetics,  10. 

Dannreuther,  E.,  160  n,  166, 
168  ;  Oxford  History  of  Mu- 
sic, 160. 

Dante,  10,93,  "96;  Purgatorio, 

93- 
Darwin,  Erasmus,  26 ;  Botamc 

Garden,  25. 
D'Aubignac,  30. 
David,  Felicien,  Le  Disert,  162, 

172. 
Debussy,  C,  160,  238. 
Delille,  Abbe,  26  n. 
De     Quincey,     Thomas,     153, 

1 58. 
Descartes,  64. 
Desportes,  156. 
Dickens,  Charles,  200. 
Diderot,  ix,  39  f .,  42,  1 1 7  ff .,  121, 

124  f.,  130,  137,  142,  153,  174, 

200,  215  ;  Letter  on  the  Deaf 

and  Dumb,  117,  122. 
Donatus,  A.,  23  n. 
Dryden,  11  n,  23  n,  24  £.,  156  n, 

224. 
Du  Bos,  Abbe,  30  n,  240  n. 

Emerson,  R.  \V.,  29,  200  f.,  227  f. 
Erasmus,   187;    The   Praise  of 

Folly,  77. 

Euclid,  38,  190. 


Faguet,  Emile,  119. 
Fenelon,  8;  Tclemaque,  29  f. 
Ford,  John,  1 13  n. 
France,  Anatole,  46,  183. 
Francus  Sagittarius,  75. 

Gautier,  T.,  ix,  149  £.,  155,  158  £ 

Ghil,  R.,  183. 

Giorgione,  123  n. 

Goethe,  vii,  6,  36,  69,  108. 

Gomperz,  T.,  91  n. 

Goncourts,  142,  152. 

Gorres,  61  n. 

Gottsched,  63. 

Gouvon,  Count  de,  78. 

Gray,  Thomas,  138,  156;  Elegy^ 

156. 
Gregory,  Pope,  68. 
Grieg,  162  f. 

Haeckel,  E.,  Riddle  of  the  Uni- 
verse, 211,  213  f. 
Hardy,  Thomas,   The  Dynasts^ 

232. 
Haym,  R.,  80  n. 
Hazlitt,  William,  97.  123  n,  125, 

127  f . ;  essay  on  Gusto,  127. 
Heine,  H.,  83,  163. 
Heinsius,  De  Tragocdia  Consti- 

tutione,  6. 
Herder,  1 16  f.,  1 19,  225  n,  229. 
Heredia,  155. 
Heltner,  H.,  65,  222  n. 
Hildebrand,  A.,  233  n. 
Hoffding,  206  n. 
Hoffmann,  E.  T.  A.,  107  n,  175 

f . ;  Kreisler^s  Musical  Poetical 

Club,  175. 
Homer,   12  n,  25,  49,  115,  117, 

119  ff.,  243. 


[256] 


INDEX 


Horace,  3,  4  n,  5,  17,  23,  41,  61, 
79,  231  f. ;  Ars  Poetica,  4. 

Howard,  W.  G.,  11  n. 

Huber,  H.,  162. 

Hugo,  Victor,  15,  71,  132,  145, 
149  f.,  162,  167  f.,  197,  240, 
246 ;  Ce  qu^on  entend  sur  la 
montagne,  168 ;  Legende  des 
St  hies,  135. 

Hume,  112. 

Hutten,  Baroness  von,  172  n. 

Huysmans,  J.  K.,  178  f.,  181, 
183 ;  A  Kebours,  178,  {Des 
Esseintes)  58,  180  ff.,  184. 

Ibsen,  197. 

James,  Prof.  William,  212. 

Jaubert,  Mme.,  177. 

Jesuits,  7. 

Johnson,  Dr.,  24,  42  f.,  80,  86  n, 

236. 
Joubert,  99  f.,  103,  116  n. 

Kant,  83  n. 

Keats,  57,  76,  79,  113,  130, 
145;  Endymion,  76;  Lamia, 

79- 
Ker,  W.  P.,  23  n. 
Kipling,  153,  172  n. 
Kircher,  Athanasius,  54,  55  n; 

Musur^a,  54. 
Klinger,  Max,  134  n. 
Klotz,  43. 
Knecht,  J.  H.,  Portrait  musical 

de  la  nature,  164. 

La  Fontaine,  48,  77,  156. 
Lamartine,  115,  145,  154. 
Lambercier,  137. 

[2 


Lanier,  S.,  173  n. 

Lasserre,  P.,  xii,  xiii,  236,  246. 

Le  Bossu,  242  f. 

Leconte  de  Lisle,  154  f. 

Legouis,  E.,  26  n. 

Leibnitz,  64. 

Lemaitre,  Jules,  184,  222. 

Leonardo  da  Vinci,  191. 

Lessing,  viii  ff.,  xiv,  19,  32  ff., 
38ff.,42ff.,50ff.,S7f.,85,97, 
ii6ff.,  125,  134,145-  150.  152. 
154,  186, 190  f.,  227  ff.,  233  n, 
252  ;  Hamburg  Dramatttrgy, 
38;  Laokoon,  vii  ff.,  11  n,  34 
ff.,  38,  43,  52  f.,  116,  121  f., 
125,  150. 

Levasseur,  Therese,  208. 

Lipps,  Prof.  Theodor,  220,  221 
n,  238. 

Liszt,  160,  162,  165,  167  f.  ; 
Poimes    symphontqiies,    168. 

Locke,  174. 

Longinus,  41  f.,  63, 102  ;  On  the 
Sublime,  41. 

Loti,  P.,  141  ;  Last  Days  of  Pe- 
king, 151. 

Louis  XIII,  170  n. 

Louis  XIV,  xii,  42. 

Lowell,  J.  R.,  24,  39. 

Lucian,  73. 

Luther,  36  ff.,  193. 

Maeterlinck,  94. 
Malebranche,  Father,  60  f. 
Maleshcrbes,  M.  de,  140  n. 
Malherbe,  156. 
Mallarme,  ix,  155,  157,  183. 
Mambrun,  Father,  3,  21,  74  ff. 
Marcus  Aurelius,  94. 
Mercure,  54. 

57  J 


INDEX 


Middle  Ages,  74,  loi  n,  no,  191, 

229. 
Mill,  John  Stuart,  206. 
Milton,  27,  126,  214. 
Moliere,  42. 
Mozart,  169,  230. 
Musset,   Alfred  de,  99,   13S  f., 

176 ;  Le  Merle  Blanc,  13S. 
Muzio,  115. 

Napoleon,  vii,  108. 

Nerval,  Gerard  de,  169,  170  n. 

Newman,  Cardinal,  39. 

Newton,  Isaac,  55  n. 

Niecks,  Frederick,  160  n. 

Nietzsche,  162,  197. 

Novalis,  ix,  80,  84  f.,  132,  155. 

Ossian,  158. 

Partenio,  12  n. 

Pascal,  69,  loi,  209. 

Pater,  Walter,  62,  123  n. 

Patrizzi,  1 5  f .,  44. 

Pearson,  N.,  31  n. 

Petrarch,  10 1  n. 

Plato,  85  ff.,  94,  96, 98,  135,  224, 

228    f.,    250    f. ;    Laws,    91 ; 

Phadrus,  96,  135. 
Plutarch,  48. 

Poe,  E.  A.,  157,  179  f.,  219  f. 
Poincare,  PL,  La   Valeur  de  la 

Science,  211. 
Pope,  12  n,  25,  27. 

Racine,  6. 

Raphael,  97. 

Renaissance,  ix,  4  ff.,  8,   11,  15, 

28,  34,  36, 40,  43  f.,  48,  88,  191, 

193,  200,  218,  220. 

[2 


Renan,  Ernest,  207  f.,  235  ff.  • 
Prayer  on  the  Acropolis  (Sow 
venirs  d^en/ance  et  de  j'eu- 
nesse),  234. 

Revolution,  The  French,  27,  64. 

Reynolds,  Sir  Joshua,  188;  Dis- 
courses on  Art,  II. 

Rimbaud,  Arthur,  55  n,  183. 

Robortello,  5. 

Rocheblave,  S.,  33,  53  n. 

Rodin,  232,  233  n,  238;  Belle 
qui  fut  Heatdmiere,  232. 

Rossetti,  D.  G.,  ix,  99,  134. 

Rousseau,  ix,  xii,  15,  65  ff.,  78  f., 
81  f.,  83  n,  89  ff.,  94,  98  f.,  103 
ff.,  107,  inf.,  114,  121  ff.,  127 
f.,  136  f.,  140  ff.,  144  ff.,  158  n, 
161,  163  f.,  173,  176,  179,  194 
f.,  199  f.,  204  f.,  225  n,  228; 
Essay  on  the  Origiti  of  Lan- 
guage, 121,  173. 

Rossini,  169. 

Rostand,  153. 

Rymer,  20,63,  72,  75  f. 

Sainte-Beuve,  72,  115,  140,  143.. 

146,  152,  171,  238,  240. 
Saint-Pierre,  B.  de,  141,  144. 
Saintsbury,  Prof.  G.,  71. 
Santayana,  Prof.  G.,  93,  203  f. 
Saunderson,  118. 
Scaliger,  12. 
Schelling,  61  n,  65,  213. 
Schiller,  Zt,   ".  162,    168;    Dit 

Ideale,  168. 
Schleiermacher,  213. 
Schlegel,  A.  W.,  61  n,  65,  85, 

86  n,  125  n. 
Schlegel,  Friedrich,  ix,  84,  196, 

204. 

58] 


INDEX 


Schmarsow,  A.,  233  n. 

Schopenhauer,  91. 

Schubert,  169. 

Schumann,  162  f.,  173. 

Scudery,  G.  de,  30  n. 

Shaw,  Bernard,  239. 

Shelley,  1 12  n,  113  n,  163,  197. 

Simonides,  3,  56,  61. 

Smithson,  Henrietta,  167. 

Soame,  156  n. 

Society,  The  Royal,  32. 

Socrates,  91  f.,  94,  96  f.,  251. 

Sophocles,  130,  203,250;  Anti- 
gone, 199. 

Souriau,  P.,  129  n. 

Spence,  33,  61  n  ;  Polymetis,  33. 

Spenser,  27,  72,  227  f. 

Spingarn,  Prof.  J.  E.,  192  n. 

Stael,  Madame  de,  65. 

Stendhal,  142. 

Stephen,  Leslie,  158. 

Sterne,  Laurence,  68. 

Storm  and  Stress,  38,  64  f. 

Strauss,  Richard,  160,  162,  169, 
237,  246;  Don  Juan,  168;  Do- 
mestic Symphony,  246,  247  n. 

Suphan,  117  n,  229  n. 

Taine,  H.,  210. 
Tasso,  192. 

Telemann,  Kapellmeister,  53. 
Thomson's  Seasons,  26  n,  31,  34, 
47,  137- 


Tieck,  ix,  155,  157  n,  175,  194, 
222  n ;  Magelone,  Zerbino,  175. 
Titian,  128. 
Tolstoy,  196. 

Velleius  Paterculus,  240  n. 
Verlaine,  P.,  145,  155,  236,  243. 
Vico,  225  n. 

Virgil,  12,  13,  93;   Georgics,  28. 
Volkmann,  L.,  233  n. 
Voltaire,    30  n,  36,    58,  70,  80, 

147  f.,  240  n ;  Temple  du  Goilt, 

30- 

Wagner,  Richard,  106,  107  f., 
108,  157  n,  173, 177  f.,  197  ff., 

237- 

Waller,  156. 

Weber,  159,  169;  Freischiitz, 
162. 

Whitman,  Walt,  81. 

Wilde,  Oscar,  243. 

Winchelsea,  Lady,  Nocturnal 
Reverie,  25. 

Winckelmann,  32. 

Wolf,  Christian,  64. 

Wordsworth,  10,  16,  18,  23  ff., 
81,93  f.,  96,  98,  107,  131,  135, 
188  f.,  206,  246,  249;  Guilt 
and  Sorrow,  27  ;  Ode  on  Inti- 
mations of  Immortality,  94. 

Zola,  E.,  147,  148,  245. 


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